Transitioning the world through collective intelligence

Large-scale collaborative deliberation. For this community?

I was doing my RSS review on collective intelligence where I found a full article called All Together Now (or, Can Collective Intelligence Save the Planet?) from Thomas Malone.

Besides appreciating some insights of Malone about sustainability I was interested in following the links of what the MIT is doing in regards to "Climate change" and collaborative deliberation. What I found is a debate / deliberation process that rings the bell as something that can be applied in this community.

Its called "Argument mapping" and it has a clear process on how to go from a problem into "solutions" in a faster more accurate way. This is what is said on Argument mapping:
Argument maps represent the kind of distilled and organized knowledge people are hungry for. If you have something important and unique to offer, its much more likely to be seen in an argument map than in a traditional forum.

Being a process artist I love to learn and test social technologies for empowering a group to tap into its collective intelligence. An attractive piece is that this process seems possible to apply online inside forums. I am going to jump more into it to understand, extract the rules (agreements) to open the possibility for a collaboratorium lab in TheTransitioner network. It seems very moderator centered.

One of the criticisms I have heard of the MIT collective intelligence is that they focus mainly in the intersubjective, external part of CI. It focuses in systems, prediction markets and how computers can empower CI. My perspective is that its great and incomplete. I value the discoveries and commitments of MIT without falling into the trap that its the only side of CI possible.

With this in mind I am going into Argument mapping connecting with what I have learned of other MIT professor. Doctor Otto Scharmer who leads the discoveries of "The U theory" which invites us to go "Beyond the mind" when we want to bring into present the emergent future. In other words for innovation we need to tap to source, to the center, to emergence. Not easy to do online though. Not impossible either. We are creating the new forms. Lets open to creation.

Any comments are fully appreciated? Can this process work? yes/no why? Are you opened to test it?

The next video shows the deliberation "Argument mapping"process.

It graphically show pyramidal intelligence has the limitation of a communication that doesn´t flow to all parts of the system. No holopticism. No dynamic relation to the whole.

If you are interested Download a paper about the collaboratorium and climate change experience

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Comment by Wael on July 20, 2009 at 1:38pm: It looks to me the MIT tool above is covered in http://debategraph.org , where every one can build a link to an existing minds-graph . Here you see for example how I have added my concept-draft to an existing issue.

@Marc , after I saw google-wave I began to thing how all existing tools going to be synthesized/waved through it >> the gate for unified living intelligent organic structure?

Comment by Marc Tirel on June 3, 2009 at 9:48am: Hello all,

I'am adding here 2 new elements to be considered:

1) The new "Google Wave" innovation
For those who didn't see it yet it really impressive for synchronicity and collaboration. Could be very useful for all of us.
http://wave.google.com/ (video is quite long 1h20')
The tool should be available before the end of the year hopefully in september

2) This paper from the MIT. Quite interesting.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1381502
It tries to establish a "genome" for collective intelligence.

Also together with the Web explorators (http://explorateursduweb.com/) we are about to test Buddypress http://buddypress.org/ as
a possible alternative to Ning ? Anyone knows it or has experience with it ?

Comment by Vincent on May 21, 2009 at 12:30am: Concerning ways to deploy knowledge and wisdom on-line within large groups, my learnings and thoughts so far are:

1. The human quality of members and their desire to build together will overcome present technical limitations. These qualities and desire need therefore to be consciously and continuously nurtured. How to achieve this could be further discussed (gardener, etc.)

2. I remember fruitful problem solving sessions where each one was writing down his ideas on Post-Its and then all where put on a big wall. We looked at them, made comments and started to shuffle them around to create a first structure, a first map. This stimulated a new wave of ideas and comments, again captured on Post-Its, put on the wall, the previous map was adjused, and so on.

Each member's contribution in TheTransitioner could be a Post-It like object in the existing information structure. If each member could simply copy and drag the Post-It like object of interest to his own wall, he could then start to create his map to deploy and reflect his own interests.

Imagine then creating your map with Post-It like objects from different discussion groups and communities, further adding your own Post-It objects directly to your map. This map will create a picture of your interests, will hint towards what you evolve, etc. It will complete dynamically your profile. And when my wall and map are accessible to someone else, he could also:

1. Copy the whole or parts of my map to complete his own.
2. Place a Post-It on my wall, or even map (if a friend for example), to help me with the deployement of my map.

Maps could be further rated (* to *****) as to facilitate their evolution in capturing and representing the wisdom and consciousness of the group.

Maps could be discussed and edited in groups specifically to foster knowledge emergence, thus the generation of new maps. Collective maps will then emerge that could become the main structuring platforms, members posting directly on them.

Does that tool set exist yet? I tested XMind to explore that kind of deployment. It is a decent tool to build my map with info from my PC, but, and I need to explore further, it does not seem to have the collaborative capabilities described above.

Comment by Duncan Work on May 16, 2009 at 1:14am: I like and agree with your point about how Web 2.0 technologies don’t focus well on enabling reflective conversations. True. I sort of grew up online on Caucus in the early 90s and still think it’s a great platform for asynchronous conversations. In fact, I recently installed the latest, open source version on my server; but haven’t used it much yet. On the other hand, this current tool seems like it can work.

Ever since I learned about dialogue (from reading Bohm) several years ago I have had the question: “How do we make it scale?” How do we create a ‘viral’ process that enables some form of the dialogue process and experience to spread to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people, in a way that promises to catalyze significant, measurable, social change, e.g., helping to transform current paradigms of thinking and decision-making that are currently based on battles between opposing views and narrowly defined interests.

A precursor question is of course, “Can dialogue scale?”

It’s easy to simply say, well, it can’t really scale, because meaningful dialogue, that can bring about significant change, requires commitment, reflection and inner-change. People don’t *do* reflection on the Net these days. (As you pointed out.)

[And yet, people *do* reflect on the Net, in their blogs. But blogs are good for reflection, but not so good for reflection together in the same place. A conversation happens, but is very fragmented and hard for others to follow. It's more a bunch of comments and track-backs, and not really a conversation.]

Nevertheless, I have been gathering some baby ideas about this, which I haven’t tested very well yet. I’ve also recently been doing some exploring regarding what has been done already – e.g., by Web Labs, America Speaks, etc., etc. I have not yet brought all of this into focus yet. But my general idea is to first convince myself that this is a project worth pursuing – or not. And then, assuming I’m encouraged to keep going, to collect several innovative and experienced people together to help think through the problem and possible solutions. This is something I would love to do here if there is interest, though not necessarily starting immediately, because I feel I need to do some more thinking and exploring on the side.

BTW, we (conversation and collective thinking lovers) all have our own favorite methods. The National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation lists over 400 methods. I know of only a few, and one of my favorites for group problem-solving or innovating is the “Focused Conversation” method. I like it because it has a very logical structure that seems to help people with diverse views all get the benefit of hearing each others’ views, and then, from that basis, thinking together about solutions, and creating a plan for action. (I'm not trained in the method, and I'm not really a facilitator.)

I am open to trying out any method here to explore or maybe solve almost any interesting problem that can work best with a CI type approach.

Comment by Fernanda Ibarra on May 14, 2009 at 11:59pm: Thank you very very much Duncan for posting your perspective on the Collaboratorium experience. I appreciate it as I was going to go into it to get answers for what you already posted! It serves for the experience of why peer to peer learning calls me. You pointed me to answers and now I have the feeling of moving forward.

I am interested in looking for a process that would be good for our forums here in TheTransitioner community who wants to serve the domain of collective intelligence, wisdom and consciousness. I have been involved in online communities and online learning for over 10 years now and knowing what it takes to spark conversations within certain contexts (for example, academic is fairly easy because the grades are involved I want to play with the particular conditions of this community. Some of them are:

- Ning limitations: What I observe in many ning communities is the poor capacities it has to follow conversations. Sometimes I am really amazed about how web 2.0 technologies don´t have the conversational power of web 1.0 in the spaces of the forums. Technologies like caucus for example allow for easy following, replying, threading of conversations. From the ning communities I follow only one has forums which are in fire!

- Time /attention: We are living in times where the streams of content are too wide. We have to learn to master what we pay attention to, how to create meaning from the large flows, how to quickly update in that which interests us. For me conversations happen more and more in real-time, in the immediacy of the daily streams. Less and less I go into deep spaces of reflection. I certainly feed many communities but not many in depth.

What is your experience? What would serve you and call you to invest more time in gifting a forum with your time, knowledge and energy?

I have some ideas for experimentation that I will like to test with people willing to moderate. I do feel that having concrete forum / group ideas, within a time span, with clear objectives and a good presentation (call) as a start point would do great. What do you think?

Which are the best forms of dialogue? how to combine the depth of forums with the potentials of microblogging? What are the best forms to engage our audience? How to deal with scarcity of time/attention? What is the criteria for a good online conversation to thrive? How can we play together?

Comment by Duncan Work on May 9, 2009 at 1:39am: I'm not sure this conversation is a going concern, but I can comment on the MIT paper on the climate change collaboratorium (link above in Fernanda's first post). The article gave a very interesting overview of argmentation theory, advantages, possible problems, and methods. It then reported on a field test combining 3 different but very related argumentation methods (Including IBIS - Dialogue Mapping). The test involved 220 graduate students at the University of Naples. The students participation was part of their course and so it affected their grade. Prior to beginning the process of arguing for and against "use of biofuels" the students were given 4 2 hour lectures on Collective Intelligence, argumentation theory and IBIS, and Italian policies related to the topic. Even so common mistakes made included:

- Posting news-like posts instead of IBIS type questions, ideas, arguments.
- Not distinguishing btwn ideas and arguments.
- Putting multiple arguments into a single arg post.
- Linking arguments to a logically irrelevant location in the argument map.
- Proliferating questions and ideas without any associated pro/con arguments.
- Selecting the wrong scheme for arguments.

However, the group did get better with practice over time.

70% of all arguments were pros rather than cons and the depth of the argument tree was small, "indicating relative dearth of debate."

So the setup was first of all very atypical of 'real-world' situations (captive audience, 8 hours of preparatory lectures, advanced degree program students, etc.) and the results still weren't particularly convincing.

I'd like to know what has happened since then (the paper was dated Dec. 2007).

I'm getting the idea that argumentation methods are especially good for getting committed experts and policy makers to hash-out issues and solutions, and for exposing strengths and weakenesses of arguments. I can't yet see it as a "large-scale" method for online deliberation.

Comment by Duncan Work on May 6, 2009 at 12:50am: I accidentally posted my comment above before I was done. The Collaboratorium video was interesting. Do they have an argument mapping tool that can enable groups like this to use online?

Argument mapping seems to be extremely analytical and logical, and of course there’s a huge need for more rigorous analysis. I’m interested to see how it works in practice – e.g., how or if it can deal with strong biases that even scientists and other really logical people can have. That is, how good can it be for actually changing minds of participants. That seems to require more skills for moderators than those listed in the video. I also think that Benigne’s questions are good -- about the effects of the complexity of the map that can be generated, and whether the process encourages collaborative creativity rather than just stating positions. Good questions maybe to pose the Collaboratorium folks.

I also like the idea of thinking about adding ‘emergent’ elements, as you suggested, Fernanda, re the “U Theory” and “beyond the mind” thinking, and would like to know more what that is.

Comment by Duncan Work on May 6, 2009 at 12:24am: There is another related tool called Dialogue Mapping.

Comment by Fernanda Ibarra on May 2, 2009 at 8:07pm: Thanks for your comments Vincent and Bénigne. I am called to go further in the research to see if its appropiate to test in thetransitioner community. Please do share any findings in here. I will come back to this blog post. Pieces around the methodologies, tools and case studies will be very helpful.

I have researched several mindmapping tools from Cmaps (which I used for years) to bubbl.us to mindmaps and others. I am interested in Debategraph for this particular subject. What you think?

Comment by Vincent on April 29, 2009 at 4:02pm: Interesting methodology/tool that seems appropriate for developing discussions into a tree bearing fruits. There is also a mind mapping aspect that is of interest. As we gain more experience using it, I trust that its drawbacks will be weeded out thanks to the values and expertises animating this community.

How easily could we transfer the structured content to another system? Interoperability is intuitively important so that the tree can be transferred to another landscape according to its evolution, the needs of others, etc.

Would XMind be also useful? A free open source version is available, I am going to test it.