Background info on collective intelligence
and communities of practice, life-work community, and presencing
What is collective intelligence?
"Collective intelligence" means different things in different social (and animal) contexts and scientific disciplines. My friend and colleague, Tom Atlee, published a small, compact and brilliant essay on "Defining Collective intelligence" . It is worth to read if you are curious of a sample of ways to defining CI.
My "Forms of CI" can also be helpful to those who just want a quick intro to the field. Those of us, who are even more curious and want to know more about CI seen through the lenses of Tom and George, look up our "Collective Intelligence as a Field of Multi-disciplinary Study and Practice."
If all or any of that is too much, and you only want to know what we mean by CI, the sense in which we use it at rb9, here it goes (quoted from "CI as a Field…"):
1. Collective intelligence is any intelligence that arises from -- or is a capacity or characteristic of -- groups and other collective living systems.
2. Collective intelligence is the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as differentiation and integration, competition and collaboration.
Collective intelligence and sensing, collective memory and navigating are our best chance to overcome information overload when we live on the edge, in a chaordic world, want to make meaning of it, and contribute our energies and talents to better it.
Collaborative video mining
Web technologies allow ordinary people engage in “video clip” conversations about questions that matter to them. Making the video-clips public, they let the world in. Tagging those clips, they attract those who may be interested in this or that subject that they talk about. Large bundles of memes emerging from many-to-many conversations have never had a chance to travel that fast, truly with the speed of the light, and reaching people world-wide.
What are the best tools that pattern-seekers and map-makers can use for portraying a very dynamic emergence when millions of people are engaged in co-creative initiatives? On YouTube, it is a combination of favorites, tagging, shareable playlists and "this video is a reply to that video" hyperlinks. In our talk, we will illustrate a method of collaborative vid-mining as a new CI practice that we can improve as we go.
Communities of Practice
We are, in a sense, in the first phase of global collectivity, where we are finding each other and saying hello. We are entering a creative revolution that the founders of the Internet have not even dreamt of. Global collectivity could allow the easy formation of groups that pioneer new forms of creative content and collective consciousness. The many forms of collective intelligence that are emerging, are opening the world to an unforeseen revolution of thought, access, and hopefully, wiser social systems.
In this talk, we will focus mainly on two vehicles collective intelligence: communities of practice (CoP) and life-work communities. Communities of practice are free associations of people who interact to improve their craft together. As they do so, they develop new capabilities, both individual and collective, which are the source of increasing value to their members and external stakeholders.
We may all belong to more than one CoP at once. Let's take the example of a fictitious CoP focused on improving the CI-boosting tools, methods, and practices in a social network, such as Reboot. What could they do? Here's a scenario that we can actually try out at Reboot 9. Some members of the community engage in interviewing others to unearth successful CI practices. Based on that, they may develop a pattern language to describe them, and the patterns, in which those practices are recorded make them explicit and more suitable as target for shared learning and improvement. If you want to help with that process, leave us a comment.
We think of communities of practice as a social life form, between networks and systems of influence, which are essential for scaling up social Innovation.
There's more on CoP in George's book chapter on “Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice.”
A life-work community
Just like CoP, life-work communities also tend to be frequently informal groups. "That which defines a Life-Work Community is that it consists of people who choose to continuously inquire into which perspectives inform their life and work… A Life-Work Community can be seen as a social structure, held together by the willingness to inquire into the highest perspectives on life and work… So we don't necessarily have the same perspectives. The point is that we are willing to inquire into our perspectives and their influence on how we work and live our life. The sense of community comes, among other things, from the fact that we choose sometimes to do it together."
That quote is from The Life-Work Community Inquiry, by the late Finn Voldtofte who was a pioneer of the World Café, the ”magic in the middle” and other CI practices.
About "presencing"
Presencing is a social technology for "building landing strips for the future in need of us" (Otto Scharmer). Scharmer is a professor at MIT, whose work has deeply inspired George's. Sometimes the term is used as synonymous with, or an application of, Theory U to evoking and embodying our memories of the future.
You can find out more about presencing at the site of "Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges," a new book by Otto Scharmer. The "U Curve" consists of 5 movements exemplified below.
We, who co-initiated this talk/experiment, are ready to co-sense with all of you what that larger "we" need to learn so that it can co-presence a vision of the future for collective intelligence, which it can co-create and co-evolve with.
In the days leading up to our meeting in Copenhagen, we will come back here, read your comments and questions, and try to live up to that quality of this pre-conference exchange what Dannie Jost described as "this is emergence at its best." You can greatly help with that, by posting here any CI-related question that you'd like us to cover in our presentation.
