This article is part of a trilogy of entries that I am going to publish in this blog to discuss the possibilities that Design offers to conceive participatory spaces that reinforce the democracy.

In this article, I define “collective intelligence for democracy” as the ability to reason, learn, create, solve problems or make decisions in a large group through participatory and legitimate mechanisms that return power to the citizenship.

One of the great challenges that collective intelligence for democracy faces is scaling, due to its demandingly high coordination costs. That is why one of the questions that should be asked is how can interactions be designed to manage collective intelligence in very large groups. For instance: does scaling generate a structural and unsolvable failure that makes good deliberation on a large scale impossible, or could that failure be corrected through design? Read more ›

In return to my recent reflection on the “participatory architectures” for innovation, the issue that really fascinates me; the essential question I’ve been asking is: What can explain that some participatory projects work better than others? Are there any patterns of the collective behavior that help us to improve the participatory initiatives´ design?

Learned by several recent experiences (some good and some bad ones), the invisible hand of participation is an effective filter for innovation only if it´s conceived within an intelligent architecture of interactions.

On a further consideration, I consider there are four pillars that have a decisive impact on the success or failure of that “architecture”: 1) Ability of call, 2) Ability of structure, 3) Filtering capacity, 4) Synthesis capacity. Read more ›