Blogs: Collective Intelligence Everywhere

Sunday, April 25, 2004 - 07:11 PM

UPDATED What is Enlightenment? magazine has a section and article in their new issue on Collective Intelligence, "discovering that wholes are far more than the sum of their parts. When individuals unite in a shared intention, something mysterious comes into being¬ówith capacities and intelligences that far transcend those of the individuals involved." It relays ideas of complexity to what Tom Atlee calls Co-Intelligence and much more, Flemming Funch, better know as Ming the Mechanic has an article about it too.

Tom Munnecke, visiting scholar at Stanford University's Digital Visions Program Fellowship had an article on Kevin Jones' idea of Collective Intelligence. Collective Intelligence www.collectiveintelligence.net, "is dedicated to accelerating the flow of capital to good, encouraging money and other resources to be more effectively applied to companies and projects that positively impact social and economic problems by helping to create sustainable local businesses."

UPDATED:
Tom Atlee's recent contributions to this work are on the Collective Intelligence Blog (weblog) where he discusses eight forms of collective intelligence people seem to be talking about:

* Reflective collective intelligence. This includes efforts by groups, organizations and communities to consciously use their diversity as a resource to address common concerns. Here we find all those great methods for dialogue and deliberation

* Structural collective intelligence. This is generated by official standards, architectural and community designs, laws, institutions, and other social systems that help people's collective behaviors add up to something that makes sense instead of frustrating them or creating more problems. For example, statistics that reveal how healthy and happy a community is generate more collective intelligence than those (such as Gross Domestic Product) that measure only how much money gets spent.

* Evolutionary collective intelligence. This is the learned wisdom and workable patterns that we find embedded in cultures (e.g., myths and proverbs) and ecosystems (e.g., the field of biomimicry), as well as in society's great collective learning enterprises like scientific, academic and thinktank research activities that cultivate ever-expanding fields of evolving knowledge.

* Informational collective intelligence. This form of collective intelligence is generated by the fact that so much information is available to so many people through media, libraries, the Internet,
networks of associates, and so on. Some information technology visionaries speak of this as "the global brain."

* Noetic -- or consciousness-based -- collective intelligence. Prophets, mystics, shamans, clairvoyants and everyday meditators often connect with levels of reality or sources of wisdom beyond normal awareness, usually realms of deep kinship, wholeness or Oneness. As more people develop these special modes of consciousness -- individually and together -- tapping into (or attuning to) such transpersonal realms is becoming more common.

* Flow -- or mutual-attunement-based collective intelligence. Here we may find a top improvisational jazz group or basketball team acting as one coherent smoothly-functioning entity. Here we also find intelligent flocking behaviors and hive dynamics in nature. In each case, the group just hums productively along. And in flowing human groups, individual capacities and uniqueness are often enhanced by the process.

* Statistical collective intelligence. This odd phenomenon arises from the fact that, under the right conditions, dozens or thousands of people, ants, and even virtual "agents" (entities that exist only
in computers) can arrive at brilliant solutions to their problems without even communicating with each other, simply by "covering the territory" or averaging out their behaviors or guesses.

* Relevational collective intelligence. Here we find answers that seem to appear in our midst almost from nowhere, simply because they are relevant -- often by one person MISunderstanding what another person says, or by "accidentally" stumbling on the exact vital information in a newspaper. Search engines attempt to engineer this, but it often happens mysteriously in life.

So...whether you call it Co-Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, CI, or whatever...it is defintitely getting around into more and more circles.

OTHER LINKS:
• CI will also be one of the major interests being bounced around at the Planetwork Conference this year.
• The Transitioner has an wiki as well.
• A group of links by Pierre Lévy