Collective-Intelligence

Lots of things have been in flow since I’ve posted here, but here are few tidbits to explore:

• A conversation about what happens when valuable things become free.
• The Weave!
• World of Wisdom Podcast episode…

Say that we agree to define collaboration as a group’s ability to coordinate effort to produce some work output.  I believe that the effectiveness of collaboration improves in direct proportion to:

Usually I am more energized by building tech than by talking about it, but I am so excited about what my son and I did over winter break, that I just have to share about it here.  In an odd kind of busman’s holiday, I spent a good chunk of my time off writing a Holochain application.  Coding with my kid is just pure pleasure for me, but I have to describe the additional incredible experience of having spent 4 years building a tool, and now suddenly being able to use that tool to build what it was meant for: creating collaboration applications.

As is pretty obvious I don’t write much here.  My focus for the last 4 years has been pretty singular on getting Holochain and Holo built.  And writing takes me a long time.  I also have a hard time writing to the void of the Internet, I need to be in a direct conversation to share well.  Recently a friend made an open invitation to respond  “about what you’re seeing and thinking in the world right now.”  and he provided these prompts:

I’m not much of a guy for protesting.  But SOPA & PIPA are absolutely nuts.  They are terrible implementations of worse ideas.  So I’m joining the strike.  This blog will be down tomorrow.  I know I don’t get much traffic, but that’s not the point.  I must publicly stand against the moves of entrenched power to enclose the information commons.  The rhetoric around these laws pretends to be all about protecting the little guy, the artists and the economy.  But that’s totally bogus.  These laws are all about protecting the ability of large corporations to enclose ownership of more and more data, and use the government to a pawn to rend the very fabric of the Internet when that enclosure is threatened.

I’m re-reading Jim Corbett’s Sanctuary for All Life.  I don’t know how to express how powerfully deep this book is.  For me it both opens doors and provides a foundation for a post-civilized world for humanity.

My friend Jean-François Noubel has taken the vow of wealth.  I believe this has huge implications for all of us.  It opens a path by inspiration and example.  Read the FAQ too.

Recently I’ve had opportunity to reflect on why I’m particularly dedicated to the open money path out of all the many different community currency paths.

I offer it here not in the spirit of saying open money is better than other approaches, but rather just to share my understanding and what motivates me to work where I know I am best suited to contribute.

One of the many very nice concepts that I learned about first in Jean François Noubel’s work on collective intelligence is sousveillance which is the inverse of surveillance. It was first coined by Steve Mann and then later picked up by Howard Rheingold.

I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity. These terms came up again recently for me in the context of a collective intelligence discussion, which really set my mind going and has led me to some propositions and a conjecture:

This week I was given a copy of Paul Krafel’s mini-film The Upward Sprial. Which, despite, nay in part because of, some hoakyness, provides deep and powerful language and images for how to look at the world. He talks about flow, feedback spirals, and a “second solution” to the problem posed by the second law of thermodynamics. It is both philosphical and practical for those looking to change our broken world.

In March I participated in a retreat that is somewhat hard for me to describe. It’s hard because I fear being judged. So, to my more materialist friends I want to describe it as an experiment in developing the practices of collective intelligence and collective wisdom and stick to the intellectual content. To my more spiritually oriented friends I want to describe it as a re-inventing of the practices of Quaker corporate worship in the context of the post-post-modern, quantum/relativist, networked, Wilberized, self-conscious and what-else-have-you, world. But this splitting into the mental and the spritual to appease my imagined world view of this or that friend, is a mistake. A huge mistake. So now I declare: go ahead and judge me! Here’s a better description: I participated in a retreat where a small group of people together worked on integrating all levels of their awareness: physical, emotional, mental, and “soul,” into a single group awareness. I put soul in quotes because there is common agreement that parts of our conciousness are separately devoted to physical, emotional, mental awareness, and we have decent language to talk about those three types of perception, but we don’t have good language or terms to talk about “soul” perception, or even agreement that such a form of perception is even “real” (what ever that means!) and has a similar status as the other three. [And now I’m noticing that that last sentence is yet another caveat to try and prevent judgement.] For those of you with a scientific/materialist bent I recommend reading Jean-François Noubel’s paper on collective intelligence. This paper mentions only in passing at the very end the need for personal transformation. But it was that part that is what the retreat was all about. The practicing of that transformation to begin to make possible the potential for real collective intelligence. If you aren’t turned off by spiritual language, try the sacred circle web site. Some things I learned: I am generally very unaware of my body, and what it has to offer me. If I change the way I sit, I change the way I perceive. I can tell when people are speaking from a place of fear. If I take my glasses off, I can’t see detial, but detail is not all there is to see. The things that I am naturally good at, that come easily to me, are my gifts to the world. If I toss them out as if they don’t matter, I disempower myself and those gifts at the same time. One of the key structural benefits of the open source world is that it requires the formation of human relationships. Because it’s free, i.e. the value it generates has not been monitized, you can’t rely on money to get you what you want, instead you have to either rely on yourself, or, prefereably, rely on relationships with others. I am afraid of esoteric, new-agey, airy-fairy, “stuff” and I have a hard time just being with it when it shows up. Taking on and accepting as true things that people say is very different from being with them and actually listening to what they have to say. There are many levels of listening, at least four of which are: from the past (where we try and understand what we hear based on what we already know); with an open mind (where we try and learn new things that we don’t know); with an open heart (where we try and put ourselves empathically in the position of the speaker and really listen to where they are coming from); and with an open will (which is harder to describe, but it is deeper than the other three, and is similar to the experience of listening for the sense-of-the-meeting when clerking a Quaker meeting for worship with a concern for business, where not only are you listening from all the three other levels, but you’re basic will, i.e. your desires, are left open and subject to modification). Quakers already know a ton about collective intelligence and the practial stuff about what is needed to move foward in this realm, but they suck at integrating body and emotion into mental and “soul” practice. If you get into this work, it will have ramifications on your “personal” relationships. [tags]quakerism,collective intelligence,open source,FLOSS,Ken Wilber[/tags]

I’ve found that numerous times when I type into google a technical question, be it an error message that I’m seeing when installing some software package or some feature about a programming language, that where I often end up is in some person’s blog where they describe how they coped with exactly the same problem. This phenomenon seems to me a generalized solution to tech support, and also a wonderfully comunal and gift economy approach to problem solving. So I’ve decided to play the game too by creating a category for this blog called solutions, and, as often as I can, post my minor little breakthroughs in hopes that they will be helpful to someone else. And here’s my first: