To complete the trilogy of posts that I am writing in this blog to discuss the possibilities that Design offers to conceive participatory spaces that reinforce the democracy (I recommend first read the two previous releases: post I and post II), I will share as advance of the research I am doing for my book, a decalogue of principles that, in my own experience as a designer of participatory architectures, are critical for collective intelligence to be genuinely democratic

1. SIMPLICITY:

Simple rules allow for complex behaviors. Design guidelines must be minimal. The objective is to define basic principles for structuring the conversation and the aggregation. They should be a few but powerful. Be careful about over-designing because that, paradoxically, encourages simplistic behavior. Read more ›

In the previous post, I argued my thesis of why collective intelligence for democracy can be understood, and improved, from the point of view of Design. In this second post of the series, I will propose an equation (now in beta) that intends to summarize the factors that determine, and enable evaluation of, the effectiveness of a collective intelligence mechanism for democracy.

Going to the point, I propose to work with the following equation that can serve, in principle, as a frame of reference for building participatory design that can work well for the purpose:

Equation (Beta) of Collective Intelligence for Democracy:

CIforD = Effectiveness + Efficiency + Autotelic Process + Legitimacy

I will now describe each of these variables separately: Read more ›