I have not tried this, but it looks like a potentially powerful augmentation technology. -- Howard
"Expertmaker’s technology is based on Artificial Intelligence and advanced Computational Intelligence, including machine learning and evolutionary computation. This is normally very complex stuff. However, we have packaged all the advanced technology into a simple to use platform making it available to literally anyone.
The desktop toolkit is a software application you download to your PC. You use the toolkit to create your solutions. In addition this is your interface to the server and API configurations.
The toolkit contains the various AI technologies that you use to create your search solutions. You can use several different AI technologies in one solution.
With the solution you can create your own semantic structures for handling complex solutions."
Crisis mapping, combining instant reports from mobile phones with online mapping resources, is a promising emerging genre of augmented collective intelligence. -- Howard
"OpenStreetMap, the free and editable map of the world, kicked off its international conference today in Tokyo, with the entire first day dedicated to improving disaster response and crisis mapping.
With the March 2011 Tōhoku tsunami still fresh on people's minds and events like the recent Talas Typhoon reminding us that disasters are a constant threat, we know that disaster response must be an ongoing, structural concern. The Japanese community hosting the conference did a great job highlighting how crisis mapping needs to be central in disaster response efforts -- and how a free tool like OpenStreetMap can make a big difference.
Fukushima resident and mapper Kinya Inoue talks about the utter devastation the 2011 tsunami left behind."
I haven't read this yet, but it's going on my list toward the top. -- Howard
"In Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (public library), neuroscientist Christof Koch — “reductionist, because I seek quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses; romantic, because of my insistence that the universe has contrails of meaning that can be deciphered in the sky about us and deep within us” — explores how subjective feelings, or consciousness, come into being. Among Koch’s most fascinating arguments is one that bridges philosophy, evolutionary biology and technofuturism to predict a global Übermind not unlike McLuhan’s “global village,” but one in which our technology melds with what Carl Jung has termed the “collective unconscious” to produce a kind of sentient global brain:"
"There is no reason why this web of hypertrophied consciousness cannot spread to the planets and, ultimately, beyond the stellar night to th..."
Although this article focuses on education, mindmapping can be a great planning and coordination tool for any kind of group project, whether collaborators are physically copresent or geographically separated. -- Howard
"Online collaboration has become very popular in both education and business. We now have the ability to easily and freely share all file types using different cloud based platforms. People working collectively on a project or assignment no longer need to be in the same room or even in the same country for that matter.
Collaborative platforms have enabled educators to create online learning environments where students can benefit from sharing ideas and communicating with each other, their mentors and external organizations."
This screencast showcases three concept-mapping tools: cMap Tools, Visual Understanding Environment, and Mindmeister. I've used all three of them, and also Google Drawings as a concept-mapping tool http://youtu.be/Nni6_e4ZH2A and bubbl.us http://youtu.be/5IXfyOi5PtI Concept mapping is both an individual and a collective thinking tool, useful both for the products as visual representations of knowledge systems and for the process of trying to see the essential elements of systems and the connections between them. -- Howard
(Video) Concept mapping with a group can be a powerful exercise in augmenting collective intelligence -- Howard
"An animated presentation about concept mapping. Focuses on how groups can employ the technique as a tool for collaborative planning and problem solving".
Hi Robin, thanks for catching that! Sort of a funny typo, don't you think? That is the essence of what you did - you didn't just click a button - you added value for your audiences. Thanks again for being a great role model for all of us who want to learn better curation skills.
Ross Dawson is a smart guy. The six mechanisms in the paper he discusses are: an idea ecology, a web of dependencies, an intellectual supply chain, a collaborative deliberation, a radically fluid virtual organization, a multi-user game. -- Howard
"One of the many reasons humanity is at an inflection point is that the age-old dream of the “global brain” is finally becoming a reality.
I explored the idea in my book Living Networks, and at more length in my piece Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.
Today, my work on crowdsourcing is largely focused on the emerging mechanisms that allow us to create better results from mass participation.
Some of the best work being done in the space is at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. A few of their researchers (including founder Thomas Malone) have just written a short paper Programming the Global Brain.
I don’t think “programming” is the best metaphor. I prefer to think about the enabling structures and mechanisms out of which collective intelligence will be created.
However programming can be a useful frame, and in the paper the authors propose six programming metaphors that will facilitate the formation of the global brain:"
If this is confirmed, this could be important. The Dunbar Number is cited a lot -- the maximum number of strong tie relationships that humans can maintain is hypothesized to around 150 (no matter how many Facebook Friends you have) -- Howard
"Why Strong Ties Matter More In a Fast-Changing Environment Marshall Van Alstyne (Boston University), interviewed David Kiron April 3, 2012 It has become accepted wisdom that weak ties — your acquaintances, distant colleagues — can provide more novel information than close ties. But new research by Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, suggests that in some cases strong ties are better."
Crowdfunding for nonprofits that doesn't take a cut. -- Howard
"Weeve is a community of change agents. Our free, simple and secure platform connects businesses, individuals and nonprofit organizations together in order to generate positive social change, one community at a time..."
Public sphere meets collective intelligence. -- Howard
"It is not the way the scribes of yore would have done it but Iceland is tearing up the rulebook by drawing up its new constitution through crowdsourcing.
As the country recovers from the financial crisis that saw the collapse of its banks and government, it is using social media to get its citizens to share their ideas as to what the new document should contain.
"I believe this is the first time a constitution is being drafted basically on the internet," said Thorvaldur Gylfason, member of Iceland's constitutional council."
Are the deliberative and choice procedures depoyed in the exercise of democracy effective means of harvesting collective intelligence? People have doubted that since the first election -- Walter Lippmann famously argued against the proposition in the ealry 20th century in his book, "Public Opinion." Here a Yale political science professor argues that collective intelligence is superior to individual decision-making in a democracy. A preview interview -- the book isn't scheduled for publication until January 2013 -- Howard
"When it comes to elections, much worry goes into whether or not voters are truly ‘qualified’ to head to the polls. According to Jason Brennan, many are simply as bad as drunk drivers. But do we make “smarter” decisions politically as a group than as individuals? Hélène Landemore thinks the answer is yes. An assistant professor of political science at Yale university, she is also the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many, forthcoming in January 2013. Recently she took part in a Q&A about her book, explaining the concept of collective intelligence, its superiority over individual decision-making, and why democracy is the best way to make decisions for the common good. Read her interview here:"
A short slideshow about the difference between artificial and augmented intelligence and the "glacial pace of AI" compared to the web. Also to consider: AI + CI (Google's PageRank, for example) -- Howard
If it is done right, this could be a collective intelligence platform as well as a crowdsourcing tool for journalists and an experiment in the public sphere. -- Howard
"The Washington Post today announced it has launched a new platform for crowdsourcing. “Crowd Sourced” is The Post’s special feature that allows Post journalists to ask questions about today’s concerns and begin a conversation about these issues. Users will be able to answer those questions and vote for the ideas they value most, so the most popular responses are surfaced on the page."
Crowdsourcing is usually mindless -- parcelling out microtasks to many people, each of whom contribute a bit of work or perception (often for a few cents). What about combining crowdsourcing and collective intelligence (where each contributor adds a piece of the puzzle, with contributions aggregated and perhaps filtered)? -- Howard
"Personal assistants such as Apple's Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many crowdsourced workers."
Enlisting amateurs to assist scientists in solving protein-folding problems started with a distributed computation project (http://stanford.folding.edu) and then was turned into a game, Foldit. Recently, Foldit players solved a significant problem involving the enzyme protease, which is important in the functioning of the immune system. Here, Foldit founder talk about the future of massive games to solve complex scientific problems. -- Howard
Swarm intelligence involves the aggregate behavior of actors who may be unintelligent. When swarm intelligence principles are more clearly understood and applied to collective intelligence of smart actors, we may see engineered stigmergic intelligence. -- Howard
"Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.
This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.
It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability."
Finally, an analysis of "information overload" that eloquently presents the case that "it isn't as simple as all that." -- Howard
"In this sense, technology is neither an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world. To celebrate the Web, or any other technology, as inherently edifying or stultifying is to ignore its more human scale: our individual access to this imagined expanse of pure information is made possible by technologies that are constructed, designed, and constantly tweaked by human decisions and experiences. These technologies do not exist independently of the human persons who design and use them. Likewise, to suggest that Google is making us stupid is to ignore the historical fact that over time technologies have had an effect on how we think, but in ways that are much more complex and not at all reducible to simple statements like “Google is making us stupid.”"
Google's Flu Trends uses informal data, such as the number of searches for information about symptoms, to spot influenza epidemics. Health Map looks at a broad set of data from social media and other informal sources to identify epidemics. The connection with augmented collective intelligence is perhaps a little on the algorithmic side, but it's a way of aggregating many small human actions into a prediction about the future. -- Howard
"It’s neat to see how HealthMap has become a pioneer in demonstrating the value of informally collected health information. This has meant demonstrating what types of information can be used and how it can be aggregated and analyzed. By demonstrating that informal sources have added value, whether that is in giving an earlier signal, allowing more detailed understanding of a disease outbreak, or reaching more people, in the future I think we will accept and look to other new sources for health, that in aggregate can become extraordinarily valuable."
Now this sounds interesting if you think of it as a platform for augmented social cognition as peer learning -- a knowledge aggregator for personal learning networks. -- Howard
"Tappestry is the social network for learning.
For the first time, you can record what you have learned easily and immediately throughout your day. You can come back to it whenever you want. And the best part is you can share with others and learn from others with other social networks and websites.
What did you learn today? With Tappestry, you can track what you have learned and catalog it. Then you can tell everyone. Don’t be shy, you might just meet someone. You can use Tappestry to create and curate your own learning stream. Tappestry is a great place to store your learning and your thoughts and check in those little “A-ha!” moments you have. Think of it as your own learning journal or notebook for things you pick up over the course of your day all woven together to create your own distinct learning fabric, your Tappestry.
Why Tappestry? It helps you learn more. It helps you remember and track what you have learned. It helps take what you have learned and start using it."
Some nice examples of stigmergic collaboration in eusocial organisms. Humans are not cells in a superorganism, but we can apply stigmergic collaboration to collective intelligence involving populations of intelligent humans (Wikipedia, for example) -- Howard
"The algorithms based on collective intelligence have some “interesting” properties:
decentralization parallelism flexibility, adaptability “robustness” (failures) auto-organization These algorithms are inspired by the nature. Here are some examples of collective intelligence which can be observed in the nature:"
In theory, everyone is for the learning organization or the mobilization of collective intelligence. How could you be against it? Would that make you in favour of the "stupid organization"?
Yet few organizations have developed a model for a sustainable learning organization. So, is collective intelligence a myth? What are the reasons for successive failures at attempts to implement the learning organization? How can this be fixed?
Please join us in this discussion !
If you wish to participate:
. Do you have a blog? - Respond with an article you publish on your blog. Send an email to fdomon (at) entreprisecollaborative.com or a tweet to @hjarche or @fdomon to make sure we do not forget your article - Please mention the context in which this article appears: Insert a link in your article to www.entreprisecollaborative.com - If you use Twitter, send a message linked to your post using the hashtag #ecollab - We will publish all articles, or excerpts of them on the site. This will make for easier reading of the blog carnival. We will link to the original article and will contact you for a short bio and photo to include with the article
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Good blog Carnival and thank you in advance for your participation .
A good compendium of case histories of augmented collective intelligence -- Howard
"Perhaps the gold standard for collective investigative reporting is the MPs Expenses experiment by Simon Willison at the Guardian where 170,000 documents were reviewed by 15,000 people in the first 80 hours after it went live. The Guardian has deployed its readers to uncover truth in a range of different stories, most recently with the Privatised Public Spaces story. We’ve also looked at crowdmapping broadband speeds across the UK, and Joanna Geary’s ‘Tracking the Trackers‘ project uncovered some fascinating data about the worst web browser cookie abusers. #
Last year Germany’s defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a man once considered destined for an even larger role in the government, was forced to resign from his post as a result of allegations that he plagiarized his doctoral thesis. It was proved to be true by a group of people working collectively on the investigation using a site called GuttenPlag Wiki. #"
"Architectures of participation" (Tim O'Reilly) enable self-interested acts to aggregate into public goods -- Howard
"In many ways, I actually think the real idea of open source is for it to allow everybody to be "selfish", not about trying to get everybody to contribute to some common good.
In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place". No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons."
Peer production is not in itself directly relevant to augmented collective intelligence, but I believe that understanding the dynamics of p2p production entails a deepening understanding of the ways our use of media can augment collective intelligence -- Howard
"This publication is a collection of articles that deals broadly with the relationships between peer-to-peer dynamics, and the design, production and provision of public services. Most of the cases presented are illustrative of recent developments and discussions in Finnish society, however other broader international perspectives which give historical reflection and future-oriented speculation on what might be the outcomes are
included.
There are many challenges and opportunities in designing, developing and maintaining services for participatory modes of governance, not to mention their co-creation and peer-to-peer aspects. We ask what can be learned from current research, and what is happening already beyond academia?"
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