http://www.pmcluster.com

Collective Intelligence Networks (CIN) are an entirely new way to share, trade and aggregate information. They embrace complex social networks, collaboration and market dynamics to achieve fundamental increases in human capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, aptitude and adaptation. CINs furnish a new capability infrastructure comprised of human relationships, diverse, far reaching information and markets, creating effective, fast-moving, and social information interchanges. This capability propels optimization and mastery of complex information and knowledge ecologies.

Collective intelligence Networks are growing rapidly. These networks help companies, schools, governments, and individuals to acquire, to create and lead ever-growing bodies of knowledge. Through a ceaseless flurry of self-organizing value exchanges, wikis, blogs and information markets, these stunning network capabilities achieve mastery of collective intelligence with breathtaking speed, accuracy and continuity.

Collective intelligence networks continuously amass, codify, refine and advance knowledge. Open, value-based networks enable far better decision making about product launches, features, policies and myriad other critical questions facing organizations, businesses, the environment and civil society.

by Tim O’Reilly, Dec. 27, 2008
http://radar.oreilly.com

What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative change in their entire business.

I get frustrated when I see people highlighting use of social media–blogging, wikis, twitter, customer feedback systems like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucksIdea–as if they were exemplars of what has come to be called “Enterprise 2.0.”

As I said in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo NY (and in a followup radar post), WalMart is a better example of Enterprise 2.0 than any of these more trendy examples of user contribution systems. If Google’s key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were “better linked” were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people’s queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.

I came to see just how closely MyBarackObama.com emulated these ideas of the real-time enterprise in accounts of the Houdini project, a bold program in which poll watchers eliminated the names from voters who had actually made it to the polling station from the “get out the vote” call lists:

While the hot line was too overwhelmed to be of much use, the source said the program itself still proved a smashing success….the campaign was able to clean 1.6 million voters from the call lists they distributed to canvassers that afternoon, making those lists 25 percent shorter on average.

While the infrastructure for data reporting broke down under the pressure of the election, the general trend is clear here: competitive advantage comes from capturing data more quickly, and building systems to respond automatically to that data.

Consider MyBarackObama.com as a kind of vast machine, with humans as extensions of the programmatic brain: volunteers log in to get their get-out-the-vote call lists. They place their calls, then use the web to report back their results. Those results modify the call lists for the next volunteer. At the other end, the Houdini volunteers are taking note of who is actually coming out to vote, allowing the system to dispatch additional attention to hot spots, for example where there is an undervote compared to the campaign’s projections. Meanwhile, the pruned call lists make the volunteers more effective. Inside the machine, programmers are tuning the algorithms, while top campaign staffers are making key decisions to adjust the resource mix.

Now put these three examples, Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama together, and ask yourself what they tell you about the future of business, military operations, or any large organization.

Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of what matters, “the database of expectations,” so to speak) is arguably the hallmark of living things. We’re now starting to build computers that work the same way. And we’re building enterprises around this new kind of sense-and-respond computing infrastructure. In this sense, you can argue that Microsoft’s term “Live Software” is the best name yet for the kind of software-infused enterprise we’re building.

It’s essential to recognize that each of these systems is a hybrid human-machine system, in which human actions are part of the computational loop. Back in 1998, when I was trying to understand just how people were using Perl and other scripting languages on the web, I came to recognize that web applications, unlike desktop applications, still have the programmers inside them. Perl was called “the duct tape of the internet” precisely because it was used for programming that was only expected to last a short time; the programmers were still there, constantly tweaking the application. (I first began using the image of “the Mechanical Turk” in my talks about this aspect of web applications in 2003.)

What became clear in the ensuing decade is that humans are not just part of the programming, but also sensors and actuators for computers. Our aggregate behavior is measured, monitored, and becomes feedback that improves the overall intelligence of the system. That is why I’ve said that the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 applications is that they “harness collective intelligence.”

Aside: I seem to have lost the battle to define Web 2.0 as” the use of the network as platform to build systems that get better the more people use them. Perhaps its the lure of the obvious: companies and products that harness explicit user contribution are easier to recognize than those that pursue the more subtle and difficult task of harnessing implicit contribution. Or perhaps it’s the persistent gravitational tug of the idea that the heart of Web 2.0 is ad-supported business models; therefore, enterprise features that look like those of well-known companies featuring user contribution and ad-supported business models must by definition also be “2.0.” For me, the far more profound and powerful systems come from harnessing both explicit and implicit human contribution.

Again, consider MyBarackObama.com. It definitely harnessed explicit contribution, providing a platform for volunteers to organize and host local calling parties, to blog, or perform other campaign activities. But ultimately, Obama’s ground game–old fashioned precinct-level organizing, amped up to a new level by an army of distributed volunteers armed with mobile phones and coordinated via a web application–was the key to his victory. The “explicit” social media elements of MyBarackObama.com paled in impact compared to the development of a next generation electronic nervous system, in which volunteers were trained, deployed, and managed by a web application who used them, in John McMullen’s memorable phrase, as “souls in the great machine.”

by The Transitioner – Pioneers http://thetransitioner.com

Definitions

We want here to introduce an important disctinction between territory and space. Both terms are often confused.

A space refers to a specific universe with a specific set of properties, dynamics, flows, elements, parts, etc. The professional space, the dream space, the family space, the private space, the meditation space, the intimate space… each of these spaces are familiar to us and are distinct from one another. We are used to declare to others in which space we are now, or which space we leave or enter. For instance in a meeting space you might declare to others that you just were in your thoughts, meaning you we in this very specific space with its own dynamics.

A territory is defined by boundaries, occupancy and ownership (eventhough it may not be ‘owned’ by anyone, it still refers to ownership). Land, intellectual property, expertise, even people and networks, companies, thoughts are very commonly considered as territories. Inside their boundaries they have their own sets of rules, regulation, governance.

Context in collective intelligence

These ontological distinctions are important in the collective intelligence practice.

Boundaries and occupancy pretty much seem to belong to Original Collective Intelligence (OCI). Ownership is definitely a creation of Pyramidal Collective Intelligence (PCI).

The territorial ontology is part of the PCI paradigm. It is another side property of the scarce monetary system in which scarcity triggers the sense of property, ownership and control.

Hence, organizations are perceived as territories in PCI while they are experienced as spaces in Global Collective Intelligence (GCI). This ontological distinction is not yet clear for people who transition from PCI to GCI. It is definitely hard to understand for people who are still emotionnaly, socially and culturally entrapped in the PCI paradigm (although they may intellectually understand GCI). Territory triggers old protective instincts and vital responses.

Therefore when a GCI organization is named — because organizations will always need tags and names — we can witness where people are as their own evolution by observing their emotional response: territorial or space.

COMMUNICATION

discussion forums
Discussion forum is an instrument that allows employees to initiate discussions for others review and contributes to.

blogs
Blog is the online equivalent of journal. Blog are used by employees to communicate information and keep the whole network. Blogs can be commented and linked by others bloggers, so all the intellectual capital still remains after the original authors have moved on.

instant messaging
Instant messaging allows employees to communicate with another or with groups in real time using a software installed on computer. Normally is text-based but the new softwares allow real-time audio and real-time video conversations with no cost.

social presence
Social presence applications allow employees to send updates to all those who wish to know what they are doing. There are three kinds of social presence: informational, temporal, geolocational.

virtual worlds
Virtual worlds allow employees to meet and interact with others in a computer-based environment. They allow to hold meeting, conduct training, or socialize with colleagues in a different way.

COOPERATION

media sharing
Media sharing occurs in online social networks and digital communities with a comprehensive platform and diversified interfaces to upload, aggregate, host and share images, text, applications, videos, and audios. But, effective media sharing requires more. Everyone need to be able to share, to tag, to comment and also voting other media. These should be allowing people to filter media for themselves and for others.

social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is an instrument that allows collective intelligence strategies and knowledge management. In a social bookmarking service, employees can save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups or only inside certain networks. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

social cataloguing
Social cataloguing help its contributors to build up databases of information about specific topics.

COLLABORATION

wikis
Wiki is a website whose pages can be edited collaboratively by anyone, also people without any technical knowledge. Wikis are mostly used for information that constantly changes.

human-based computation
Human-based computation is a new way to solve problems. This method relies on technology that allows humans to contribute solutions to specific problems as part of an evolutionary process. Those solutions in turn inform the software, enabling it to provide better information to the next person. It’s not the computer that solves a problem. It only collect, interprets and integrates people solutions into its own knowledge base.

CONNECTION

social networking
Social network services enable people to connect online based on shared interest, hobbies, or causes. These services allow employees to create a personal profile and become friends with other users. Inside the corporates social network is valuable when organization rewards individual efforts but needs to encourage knowledge sharing and connection with others.

tagging
tagging is an instrument that makes information easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. Employees can create tag and see the other tag that a colleague created. These tags need to reflect three features: content, context, structure.

social search
Social search takes a different approach to the problem of searching information.
Through the process of tagging, this kind of search relies on human beings to select the content that are important and index it using keywords that mean something to them.

syndication
RSS (really simple syndication) may publish frequently updated works in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata. This allows employees to subscribe and receive update from their favorite sites. RSS can be used for internal communications, information aggregation and enterprise 2.0 collaboration.

mashups
Mashup is a website or an application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

by Niall Cook from “Enterprise 2.0: how social software will change the future of work”, Gower, 2008

Communication: communication platforms are those that allow people to converse with others, either by text, image, voice or video, or a combination of these.

Cooperation: sharing software enables people to share content with others in structured and unstructured ways.

Collaboration: collaboration tools encourage people to collaborate with each other on particular problems, directly and indirectly in both central and distributed ways.

Connection: networking technologies make it possible for people to make connection with and between both content and other people.

There is clearly some overlap between these categories, most notably in the case of cooperation and collaboration. One can surmise that cooperation focuses on helping individuals work towards a common product where the knowledge gained from the process is not the goal, whereas collaboration is focused on the knowledge gained from the process of constructing something. Even so, both share the objective of enabling a group of individuals to produce something better than that which they could have produced alone.

In the context of social software, collaboration and connection require more formality than communications and cooperation, mainly because they depend on people to do things in a relatively structured manner. Likewise, connection and communication, because of the inherent focus on groups rather than individuals. These relationships can be visualized easily (see figure 1) and should be considered within the context of the appropriate corporate culture when prioritizing the introduction of different forms of social software into an organization.

Figure 1: The 4Cs formality/interaction matrix

For example, a company with predominantly formal organizational structures and a culture of group interaction will benefit most from social software that enables collaboration. Conversely, an organization with an informal structure and a culture that rewards individual effort may prefer to invest in social software to support communication. This framework can help any company decide where to focus their time and effor for most benefit, rather than being led by vendors trying to sell their blog/wiki/social networking solution without any understanding of the organizational structure or culture into which it will be introduced.

This approach can also be used to support organizational change. For example, if a company is trying to encourage a shift from individual effort to group problem solving, but within the confines of a relatively informal culture, then it should focus on cooperative social software that requires more interaction. Using this apporach, it is possible to identify the preferred social software footprint for any organization. The examples below show the social software footprints for three different organizations (see figure 2)

1. very informal, collaborative culture
2. very formal, highly collaborative culture
3. informal and formal, more focus on individual effort but some group problem solving.

Figure 2: The social software footprints for three types of organization

The next step is to overlay some of the specific tools and technologies currently available – and any more that might emerge in the future – onto this matrix in order to map them directly to organizational culture (see figure 3)

Figure 3: The 4Cs social software technology framework