collaboration ninja : Collective Intelligence for Blog Action Day

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In Japanese history the Ninja (忍者) is a warrior; one whose skills and dedication, so it is said, could not be matched by normal men. Like the Ninja, we too are warriors – but of the digital age. Using our combined skills, we strive to stand out and overcome the many barriers to a better world.

Of all these skills perhaps none is more important than collaboration. These days there is lots of advice out there about how to connect, conspire, co-create with others. We pull out what strikes us as the most insightful and practical of it, and share it here, so that we all may be collaboration ninjas.

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October 16, 2009 2 notes

Collective Intelligence for Blog Action Day

Today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day. This is a global effort to raise awareness around climate change. Coincidentally, it falls just days before October 24th- a collective day of action organized by 350.org to bring awareness to the supreme importance of the number 350. These are both examples of large, loosely connected groups distributed across the globe, coordinating their efforts over the network of the web to try and collectively address a global challenge.

Exciting right?

Well there are quite a few of us who are more than a little bit excited about such web-enabled networks. So excited, in fact, that we dedicated a whole weekend in Savannah, GA to discussing the science behind and potential of web-enabled collaborative innovation networks, or COINs. COINs fall under the larger umbrella of Collective Intelligence, a term that refers to any time a group of individuals exhibits intelligent behavior. Sounds simple, but unfortunately throughout history us humans have had a tendency to act a bit, well, bad when we all gather together in groups (beware the angry mob!).

Those of us at the COINs conference see the potential of the collaborative web to break that nasty pattern, and help us tap into our species innovative potential on a scale never seen before.

Courtesy Takashi Iba

(photo courtesy Takashi Iba)

This rag tag gang of collaboration aficionados was led by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Thomas Malone provided the keynote address, in which he revealed some very exciting news…

It’s official, the Climate Collaboratorium is operational!

See the folks at MIT, including Mark Klein, Robert Laubacher, Josh Introne and Hal Abelson think Wikipedia, google, all those other really smart web-based collaboration tools are smart, but not smart enough. For one thing, they tend to break down when dealing with issues of intense complexity or controversy. Just look what happens to a controversial page on Wikipedia. Can you imagine if we tried to get everyone together to decide a climate change policy on a wikipedia page or google group? It would probably resemble what actually happens when politicians get together in real life- which results in very little useful, actionable outcomes.

But what if we had a piece of technology to help us sort through our arguments, logic, and deliberations in a productive manner? Well that’s exactly what the climate collaboratorium does. While this technology is now in its ‘beta’ phase, this deliberation tool could help our global society make a decision as a group far more effectively than our politicians could do alone in Copenhagen or our citizens alone on Wikipedia.

“In short, it could become a combination of a kind of simulation game for climate change, a Wikipedia for controversial topics, and an electronic democracy on steroids.” -MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Working Paper