/CollectiveIntelligenceKB

A collectively curated list of the Collective Intelligence landscape

Here you can find a curated and organized landscape of examples Collective Intelligence. For simplicity sake we'll define Collective Intelligence as 'processes and/or tools that facilate people to research, coordinate and produce together both on a small scale and potentially massive scale.' (This definition will be improved over time.) WikiPedia is an example of this, where a tool (the web platfrom) + (admittedly non-optiomal) processes (discussions, taking ownership) produce a source of knowledge that could not have been produced by any single individual or company.

Why is this important?

With the complexity of society exploding, we cannot afford continuing without an ultra-efficient way of putting valuable human qualities, knowledge and skills to good use. We have many complex issues that need to be solved, requiring us to make though decisions and collaborating across many barriers including disciplines, nations, political inclinations and so forth. We also live in an age where we can produce and share information at an unprecedented scale, although the effectiveness with which we use this power leaves a lot of room to improve. With things as they are right now, we're still making bad decisions on every level and often struggle to organize ourselves well to create change. What if we could change this and create a society in which we can make informed and deliberate decisions, learn from the consequences of our actions and work together well on improving life for everyone together? Imagine goverments and companies that can really act in the best interest of everyone (including minorities) based on solid and transparent research? Imagine companies that can learn how to make the well-being of their stakeholders their firstmost priority, instead of hitting financial growth targets?

This is what you're looking at is about: getting an overview and ideas on how existing processes/tools are facilitating collective intelligence. My hope with this is that to inspire people to think what could happen as we develop in the direction of a Collectively Intelligent society. Also, the aim is to generate more awareness of the concept of Collective Intelligence, which doesn't nearly get as much attention as it should.

Contributing

You're looking at a project in its infancy. There's a lot of help needed to make concepts understandable, to research existing effort and to organize the available information to be useful and easily navigable. Therefor, you are strongly encourage to contribute in every way you can, such as reporting errors and unclarities, suggesting new projects to add, etc. by adding issues and/or creating PRs. The long-term goal would be to enable people that aren't used to GitHub to contribute more easily, but for now I just want to see whether this project can be useful to anybody.

Structure

Each effort has a summary of interesting things it does that can be learned from and re-used, with problems it addresses and discovered strengths/witnesses. The idea is to later make a more structured, machine-readable source, so we can make it searchable in interesting ways and allow people to extract the data most relevant to them, e.g. comparison of decision-making models, what kind of organizations are working to address which kinds of problems, etc.

So far, I'm not sure yet how to structure this information. There are a lot of things we can learn from (organizations, projects, research, etc.) so finding an appropriate content hierarchy will be an ongoing process. My bet is that by transitioning later on when enough content is generated to deduce a data model and transition to a machine-friendly format, we can organize and visualize the data in different ways.

Overview

Organizational models

  • LiquidO: LiquidO is an organizational model without a pre-defined hierarchy. These organizations are open for everybody to join, initially as Contributors before becoming Members. Organizational strategy, goals and activities on all levels are decided by rhythmic collective activities (from calls to events), some of which Member-only. This model also includes decision making processes, task coordination and more. (TODO: decompose its components and lessons to be learned in its own page.)

  • BridgeWater Associates idea meritocracy: An organizational model that "that encourages thoughtful disagreements and explores and weighs people’s opinions in proportion to their merits" with the goal of having the best ideas win. Key to this is Radical Transparency, meaning that everybody gets continuous feedback on their strengths and weakness, both in character, skills and knownledge. Trough this, people can continuously improve themselves, work together with the people that complement each other the best. (TODO: research, dissect and document in own page.)

Processes

  • Paper: Enabling Large-Scale Deliberation Using Attention-Mediation Metrics: This paper describes an online platform in which discussions are organized into trees. Ideas can contain ideas, opportunities and dangers, which can in turn contain others of these. The idea is to explore an argument removing rhetoric and detecting duplication, people gathering too much around a single line of thought, and other problem leading to sub-optimal exploration.

Platforms

  • Wikipedia: Wikipedia popularized the idea of the Wiki (a collection of pages that everybody can edit) by using their Open Source Wiki software to provide the largest encyclopedia available, constructed and quality checked by its contributors. Wikis have been used in other contexts, with different types of content with different rules and content structures. (TODO: more details in their own pages about the concept of a Wiki and about the governance and content editing rules of Wikipedia itself.)

  • Kialo: TODO: write short introduction and document.

  • Stack Exchange Network: TODO: write short introduction and document.

  • GitHub: TODO: write short introduction and document about Git and GitHub.

  • HackerNews, Reddit, etc.

Tools

  • Loomio: TODO: write short introduction and document.

  • Google Docs: TODO: write short introduction and document.

  • Notion.so: TODO: write short introduction and document.

  • Rational: TODO: write short introduction and document.

Uncategorized efforts