One of the things I have had trouble explaining when defining the concept of Collective Intelligence is the preceding headline. That is, there are situations that can lead to Collective Intelligence (CI) in which individuals do not interact directly or are even conscious of the fact they form part of the collective.

The MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence and many well-known authors in the field admit both the results of non-conscious aggregations and the consequences of active collaboration as manifestations of CI. In James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”, the book that popularized CI, there are plenty of examples based on pure statistical aggregation, that is, without any direct interaction among participants.

To make the differences between modalities clearer I use the terms “Collected” and “Collaborative” Collective Intelligence. Let me explain both. Read more ›

Collective Intelligence (CI) generates increasing interest as an emerging discipline, but it seems difficult to find a clear and intuitive definition of what it means. It is tried to partly alleviate that deficit by adopting the terminology used by the MIT Center of Collective Intelligence but in my opinion the CCI intends to encompass so many scopes that lead to us to a definition very little operative.

For example, Thomas Malone and his team often use this definition of CI: “Groups of Individuals acting collectively in ways that seems intelligent“. Quite frankly, I do not know if this clarifies anything or adds more confusion for people like me who are looking to put theory into action.

The ontological advances in the field of CI either do not seem to give great results. We do not have a conceptual framework that serves to agree on the narrative. The universe of disciplines that converges here is broad, and knowledge is very fragmented. The diversity is good, but there is an excess of cognitive dispersion that does not help to achieve consistent progress. In fact, I know that is difficult to categorize the issues or to have a taxonomy that contributes order when we want to accede to research results. So it seems necessary to review and to simplify the narrative we use to reach more people. Therefore I’ll try to explain what I mean by Collective Intelligence as intuitive as possible, although I do not know if I will be able to 🙁 Read more ›