Collective Intelligence – Page 120 – Public Intelligence Blog

Here is a presentation by David Eaves (from three years ago), on the importance of collaboration, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills for successful free and open source software and content projects (as well as the need for better on-line tools to support all that):

“Community Management Presentation”

His key point is that “facilitation” (enabling the community) is an essential part of open source software collaborations or open content collaborations, and that we have not prioritized for “facilitation” either in who runs such projects, the companies built around them, how people are trained, or what our online tools are actually good at supporting.

He makes a point that (in round numbers) written text over the web only conveys about 10% of human communication intent, with about another 40% being intonation and the last 50% being body language (so, 90%+ of communicated intent is lost by using text).

He says this is a reason a lot of web communications go wrong with various emotional-related misinterpretations of what people wrote, especially when people have no common face-to-face history together. He presents a model of negotiation where people build “relationship” and “communication”, and then iteratively explore “interests”, “options” to pursue those interests, and “legitimacy” (or likelihood an option will succeed) to find common ground they can work together on as a “commitment” instead of pursuing “alternatives” to the collaboration.

He contrasts that with a competitive up-front take-it-or-leave it style of advocacy for specific actions by others (a style which does not first explore broader common interests that are behind why the specific actions are desired, where common ground might be easier to find by taking a step back from the specific apparent conflict to see a bigger picture of common interests and creative ways to pursue those together).

He suggests that every conversation has four aspects (Inquire, Paraphrase, Acknowledge, and Advocate) and says people spend too much time on “Advocate” to the exclusion of these other important aspects and related skills. In general, he suggests these communications issues are why so many free and open source projects have problems and that we need better tools to support this sort of facilitation across all aspects of a project (coding, marketing, fundraising, tracking defects, providing support, etc.).

2011/08/08

Venessa Miemis: Self-Assembling Dynamic Networks and Boundary-less Tribalism (Includes Diaspora)

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking

2011: Self-Assembling Dynamic Networks And Boundary-less Tribalism

DK Matai, mi2g

Business Insider, 19 January 2011

“Self-assembling dynamic networks” is one phrase we should all memorise to prepare ourselves and to understand 2011. This phrase encapsulates the defining aspect of both the year ahead and the years to come, as we embark on the second decade of the 21st century.

Whether we act as individuals, families, communities, businesses, government departments or organizations, there can be no question that we have to listen, learn and adapt according to the massive paradigm shift created by self-assembling dynamic networks and their by-product: boundary-less tribalism.

. . . . . . . .

All Silos Penetrated

Just like biological systems, self-assembling dynamic networks are increasingly manifest in every aspect of human thought, behaviour and endeavour in the 21st century enabled by mobile telephones and the Internet. It is no longer a question of when or where… societies, governments, businesses and non-governmental-organisations are all being buffeted by the consequences of this rising phenomenon. Geo-politics, foreign policy, domestic governance, tran-national business, financial markets and online platforms are all being subject to the vagaries of self-assembling dynamic networks in countless ways.

. . . . . . .

Key Features

The key features of self-assembling dynamic networks are as follows:

1. Asymmetric power
2. Unintended consequences
3. No central control
4. No intelligent blueprint or formalised design
5. Rapid scaling
6. Unprecedented speed
7. Trans-national synchronicity
8. Total transparency
9. Creation of boundary-less tribalism
10. New order born out of chaos

Read full article….

2011/08/07

Seth Godin: Creativity Demands Deep Understanding

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking

Bypassing the leap

Every now and then, a creative act comes out of nowhere, a giant leap, a new way of thinking apparently woven out of a brand new material.

Most of the the time, though, creativity is the act of reassembling many elements that are already known. That's why domain knowledge is so critical.

The screenwriter who understands how to take the build that went into the classic Greg Morris episode of the Dick Van Dyke show and integrate it with the Maurce Chevalier riff from the Marx Bros… Or the way Moby took his encyclopedic knowledge of music and turned into a record that sold millions… if you don't have awareness and an analytical understanding of what worked before, you can't build on it.

That's one of the reasons that the recent incarnation of the Palm failed. The fact that the president of the company had never used an iPhone left them only one out: to make a magical leap.

It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.

2011/08/06

Jason Silva: Creativity, Marijuana, & Butterfly Effect

09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

On Creativity, Marijuana and “a Butterfly Effect in Thought”

Jason Silva

Reality Sandwich

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.” […] “…by some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” — Pearl Buck, Winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.

In a blog post last year entitled “Marijuana and Divergent Thinking”, Jonah Lehrer explains that many creative
tasks require the cultivation of an “expansive associative net, or what psychologists refer to as a “flat associative hierarchy.” What this essentially suggests is that creative people should be able to make far-reaching connections among all sorts of seemingly unrelated ideas, and to not dismiss one possible connection just because it seems far-fetched.

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in whicwe perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

The Imaginary Foundation says that “to understand is to perceive patterns” and this is exactly what all great thinkers have done throughout the ages: they have provided a larger, dot-connecting, aerial view of things that subsumes the previous paradigm. As Richard Metzger has written:

What great minds have done throughout history is provide an aerial view of things. A larger more encompassing view that often subsumes the previous paradigm and then surpasses it in completeness with the vividness of its metaphors. Consider now how the evolving notions of a flat earth, Copernican astronomy and Einsteinian physics have subsequently changed how mankind sees its place in the cosmos, continuously updating the past explanations with something superior.

2011/08/05

Serious Games for Serious Civic Engagement

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Policies, Serious Games, Threats

Serious Games for Serious Civic Engagement

Use The Power of Collaborative, Serious Games to Engage Citizens and

Resolve Our Budget Crises

It’s no secret. We’re broke. Local governments, state governments, the U.S. Federal Government and many international governments are all facing budget shortfalls, spending cuts and reduced services. All of us — ordinary citizens, elected officials, civic and community leaders — know that we must make dramatic changes and tough choices to solve this crisis. But how do we engage our communities in identifying and prioritizing the best possible solutions? How do we create more engaged and informed citizens?

Our Answer? Fix Broke(n) Governments through Serious Games

On January 29, 2011, The Innovation Games® Company designed and produced an in-person serious game to help more than 100 citizens, community leaders and city officials in San Jose, CA collaboratively prioritize possible cuts to the city budget.

Instead of polling residents individually, our specially designed Innovation Game®, the San Jose Budget Games, created an opportunity for ordinary citizens to negotiate with one another, listen to their neighbors and create budgets that reflected not only their own but others viewpoints. Civic leaders left the San Jose Budget Games with both a clear and actionable list of the proposals citizens could compromise on and also a record of why they had found common ground—and the game results have impacted the actual city budget.

Our experience with the city of San Jose has convinced us that games are a powerful tool for civic engagement: Thus we’re seeking funds to extend our existing in-person version of Budget Games into an online version. Instead of engaging hundreds of citizens, we want to powerfully connect tens of thousands or even millions of motivated citizens with their elected officials—and we need your help to get this done.

2011/08/052011/08/05

UN + Start-Up Seek to Get Poor Online with Cell Numbers

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Health, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Gift Intelligence, Hacking, Key Players, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Real Time

Startup Aims to Get the Poor Online With Phone Numbers

By Stephen Lawson, IDG News

U.K. startup Movirtu plans to help 3 million or more people in poor countries use mobile services by giving them personal phone numbers, not phones.

Working with a U.N.-affiliated initiative called Business Call to Action (BCtA), Movirtu will offer the numbers, which it calls mobile identities, through commercial carriers in developing countries in Africa and South Asia. People in those countries who typically borrow phones from others will be able to log into the carrier's network and use their own prepaid minutes and bits of data.

The service is called Cloud Phone, though it operates within a carrier's own infrastructure rather than on the Internet as a classic cloud service would. Having a personal mobile identity can save users money in two ways, according to Ramona Liberoff, executive vice president of marketing, strategy and planning at Movirtu. First, they can use mobile services without buying a phone, which is a luxury even at US$15 or $20 for people making $1 or $2 per day.

Second, the cost of prepaid service from a carrier typically is less than what consumers in those countries pay someone to borrow a phone, she said. Though it's customary in many of these countries to lend a phone to someone in need, the borrower is also expected to pay the lender for the usage. The average savings from using regular prepaid service instead is estimated at about $60 per year, Liberoff said.

The service will help people to use mobile banking, insurance and farming assistance services as well as make phone calls, Liberoff said. Some of these services currently can only be delivered to individuals and not to someone sharing a phone. Personal mobile identities could be a boon to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that want to use mobile technology.

2011/08/052011/10/22

Koko: Politics Needs Citizen Juries for Integrity

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Politics is too important to be left to politicians – time for citizens’s juries

By Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society

Left Foot Forward, BC, 5 August 2011

A farmer, a school teacher, a politician – just who would you trust to set the rules of politics?

That’s the question being posed this week with the launch of the In the Public Interest campaign. The call for a publicly funded ‘Citizens Jury’ to apply a “public interest first test” is a refreshing answer to the problem of entrenched elites and the failure of self-regulation. It’s a welcome reminder that we simply can’t leave banking to the bankers, journalism to the journalists or indeed politics to the politicians.

Seven Promises to America–Who Will Do This?

Category: Collective Intelligence

Paul Fernhout: Doug Eaves on Community Management 101

Venessa Miemis: Self-Assembling Dynamic Networks and Boundary-less Tribalism (Includes Diaspora)

Seth Godin: Creativity Demands Deep Understanding

Jason Silva: Creativity, Marijuana, & Butterfly Effect

Serious Games for Serious Civic Engagement

UN + Start-Up Seek to Get Poor Online with Cell Numbers

Koko: Politics Needs Citizen Juries for Integrity