Augmented Collective Intelligence

Crisis mapping and tools for organizing emergent collective response to disasters is combining human and machine filters to deal with large numbers of responses in the crucial early hours after a crisis -- in this case, Typhoon Yolanda

Harold Jarche knows his stuff. "Knowledge management" has a bad name in some quarters because it was misused to hype clunky software that nobody wanted to use. Yet KM is an essential description of what organizations, networks, institutions, communities do well or badly, and PKM -- personal knowledge management -- is one of the most essential practices for those who want to learn how to swim, not just how to keep from drowning in the info-flood. Imagine a group in which everyone blogs every day about what they are learning, everyone subscribes to the blogs that interest them and a random couple that are automatically thrown into their feed dashboard, and everyone likes, favorites, comments. Collective intelligence might not automatically emerge, but smart facilitation and tuning of such a process could pay off.

I follow Harold Jarche's astute insights into personal knowledge management. This brief collection of principles and a few links point to the social rather than the technological side of collective intelligence -- the process of sense-making that a group of people needs to practice in order to become an effective collective intelligence.

The ideas of perhaps the greatest pioneer and innovator in the field of augmented collective intelligence, the late Douglas Engelbart, should not be forgotten -- and they ought to be mined by today's students, researchers, and designers, for insights that have yet to be successfully implemented.

I've worked with Institute for the Future for decades. A late-1960s spin-off from the RAND corporation, specifically created to bring think-tank techniques to the public and private sectors (as well as the military-intelligence complex where it originated), IFTF has managed to actually do futurism instead of just calling themselves futurists -- look on their website for their annual technology forecasts. This toolkit addresses one key methodological aspect of augmented collective intelligence -- coordination

Augmented Collective Intelligence always involves a technology component and a human social component. Digital media such as personal computers and smartphones can augment the ability of individuals to think, problem-solve, and communicate. At the same time, digital networks enable people to form new kinds of publics and to work together in ways not previously practical or possible. A key to understanding the way augmented collective intelligence can emerge or even be instigated is an understanding of the way human social networks work.

If you consider the aggregation of "likes," "pluses," "up-voting" and "down-voting" to be useful means of aggregating collective opinion online (do you choose your restaurants via Yelp reviews or your books via Amazon reviews?), a recent study injects a cautionary note. This Guardian article is a good summary of the original research, reported in the journal Science ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1240466 ; ), which is behind a paywall if you aren't a subscriber.

As an educator who tries to use social media in conjunction with student-centered, collaborative, inquiry-based pedagogy, I'm interested in collective sensemaking -- which also happens to be an essential non-technological element of collective intelligence. George Siemens, who was one of the creators of the first MOOCs, wrote this insightful piece about the digital artifacts that individuals use in concert with others in the collective sensemaking involved in learning. It applies to collective intelligence as well.

When world chess champion Garry Kasparov challenged the world to a match and nearly lost, the power of augmented collective intelligence was demonstrated -- a community of thousands of chess players, linked by Internet communication fora and armed with a system to vote up suggested views, performed at a level beyond that of any of the individual participants -- as well-described in Michael Nielsen's highly recommended book "Reinventing Discovery." It wasn't just the networking, or just the skill level of the players, or just the system for deciding on moves, but a combination of all these factors.

Ever since I read Joseph Weizenbaum's prophetic warnings in "Computing Power and Human Reason" that computers are vastly multiplying the power of only one aspect of what most agree is "human," I have tempered my enthusiasm for mind-amplifiers with regular reflection on the potential shadow side.  It pays to regularly question the biggest goals of one's enterprise,whatever it may be but especially with regard to designing powerful new technologies and to reflect on which part is the means and which part is the end, so I paid attention to this critique of the idea of enhancing intelligence in the IQ sense. The critique is not about enhancing collective intelligence, but I recommend that other enthusiasts for augmented social cognition look at the possible future of that enterprise through the lens of this critique. I particularly take pause at the author George Dvorsky's suggesntion that "the biggest bang for the buck would be to concentrate on happiness." That's a hard argument to attack!

I admit to Scooping an article that I wrote, but it's worthy of the attention of anyone interest in augmented collective intelligence -- a field that Engelbart and his team invented long, long, ago (the 1960s!) The links are good for those who have not yet read his 1963 paper, Vannevar Bush's article, or seen "the mother of all demos."

Patrick Meier has been a pioneer in using crowdsourcing and social media fo the kind of collective intelligence that saves lives, starting with the Ushahidi platform, which was successfully deployed after the Haiti earthquake (real-time sms-map mashups that helped responders get quickly to the hardest-hit areas). Crowdsourcing verification of social media reports during disaster could be one of the most useful humanitarian applications of augmented collective intelligence.