Boosting Our Collective Intelligence: Getting Smarter Together

Self-fulfilling prophecy: Reboot 9 can cause an explosion of co-creative waves if we pay attention to what has heart and meaning for each of us and act on it.

It is in the air and feels like a creative tension the not-knowing of the next of what is coming up. We are curious, and bit stressed and the whole thing is great fun. Where will rebooting the collective mind lead?

From this place we can do one of two things: we can lean forward and go into this creative friction or we can lean back and say, well I am going to wait and see what happens or I want to promote my pre-conceived ideas more than want to see what wants to come into being through the emergence of something that none of may have suspected.

We see in Reboot a potential for co-creative explosion. We meet here and stick our head together to find out what is the next important thing to know. I have my things and you have your things, and through proximity and similarity, some of them may come into resonance and spontaneous combustion…

Looking together into some interesting question can actually lift us in capacity. For example: How Reboot is an example of large-scale collective intelligence in action? What are we noticing and observing, what are all the excellent CI practices present that make being here much fun? What can we create together?

How much and how soon we can get smarter together to accomplish things that we can't separately, is deeply depending on the participation of all those interested in a given collaborative project. The smarter the whole the smarter their parts can be, and vice versa.

We can create fields of collective intelligence by paying attention to what we pay attention to, and consciously harmonizing it with others. Easier said than done but we hope, coming to our slot at rb9 and staying in touch with us, you may get a taste of it.

Groups of collective intelligence have occurred millions of times during the ages. It is not an ability that is new or revolutionary; what is, is that we now have the possibility to scale collective intelligence back and forth, from local to global to local, micro -> macro -> micro.

The tools are there to enable that but tools alone won't do it. A few visionaries, like Doug Engelbart who was present here at an earlier Reboot virtually, have held the possibility of boosting collective intelligence through the right combination of social and electronic technologies. Now it's up to our generation to take the torch.

Engelbart invented the hyperlink for creating connected webs of content – a quite nice piece of innovation. We now have the chance to open the next chapter and weave connected webs of co-creative communities.

What are the next generation of tools and the next level of consciousness we need to step up to if we are to deal with the challenge that Engelbart has named as "increasing complexity multiplied by urgency".