mit

Can collective intelligence save the planet? “It’s the only hope we have,” says Prof. Thomas Malone, adding that “no one really knows whether we’ll succeed.”

Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks, Wikipedia

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Brain Power

Malone — who is “basically an optimist” and believes that in the end, we will probably make choices that will, in fact, save the Earth — is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

But for what purpose?

“Well, in some sense, that’s the most important question of all,” he says. “In the next few decades, we will be making choices that will profoundly affect many future generations.” Perhaps, he says, even our survival as a species will depend on how well we’re able to make choices that are not just smart, but also wise.

“If we want to make wise choices, we need to think more deeply about the world we want to create. And those answers can’t be found by logic or politics or economics,” he says. “Ultimately, they can only be found by looking within ourselves.”

To participate in the Climate Collaboratorium, visit http://www.climatecollaboratorium.org

Source: MIT Spectrum

How to Build a Collective Intelligence Platform to Crowdsource Almost Anything

The MIT Approach to Collective Intelligence
According to the Center for Collective Intelligence, a good collective intelligence platform (CI) must address the following themes:

  • Goals, referring to the desired outcome;
  • Incentives, referring to the motivational factors;
  • Structure/process, referring to the business model and organizational structure to complete the task; and
  • Staffing, referring to the people required to support the business model and sustainability of CI within the organization.

These four themes then translate into the following four questions:

  • What is to be accomplished?
  • Why should anyone help out?
  • How are they meant to contribute?
  • Who will perform the necessary work?

Source: Noah Raford, Large scale participatory futures systems
Derived Source: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence

Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence

Google. Wikipedia. Threadless. All are well-known examples of large, loosely organized groups of people working together electronically in surprisingly effective ways. These new modes of organizing work have been described with a variety of terms—radical decentralization, crowd-sourcing, wisdom of crowds, peer production, and wikinomics.1 The phrase we find most useful is collective intelligence, defined very broadly as groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.

By this definition, collective intelligence has existed for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies are all groups of individuals doing things collectively that, at least sometimes, seem intelligent.

But over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence. Google, for instance, takes the judgments made by millions of people as they create links to Web pages and harnesses that collective knowledge of the entire Web to produce amazingly intelligent answers to the questions we type into the Google search bar.

Source: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence

The Handbook of Collective Intelligence

This Handbook provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research. The handbook is structured as a wiki, a collection of on-line pages, editable by their readers.The handbook is hosted by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, but we hope that researchers and others from around the world will contribute to it. The process of creating this handbook could itself be an example of collective intelligence.

Source: The Handbook of Collective Intelligence, MIT

Wikipedia

According to Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, collective intelligence is mass collaboration. In order for this concept to happen, four principles need to exist;

Openness: Sharing ideas and intellectual property: though these resources provide the edge over competitors more benefits accrue from allowing others to share ideas and gain significant improvement and scrutiny through collaboration.

Peering: Horizontal organization as with the ‘opening up’ of the Linux program where users are free to modify and develop it provided that they make it available for others. Peering succeeds because it encourages self-organization – a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks.

Sharing: Companies have started to share some ideas while maintaining some degree of control over others, like potential and critical patent rights. Limiting all intellectual property shuts out opportunities, while sharing some expands markets and brings out products faster.

Acting Globally: The advancement in communication technology has prompted the rise of global companies at low overhead costs. The internet is widespread, therefore a globally integrated company has no geographical boundaries and may access new markets, ideas and technology

Source: Wikipedia: Collective Intelligence, Dimensions

Collective Intelligence 2 hour panel:
Moderator: David Thorburn

Thomas W. Malone, Alex (Sandy) Pentland PhD ’82, Dr. Karim R. Lakhani SM ’99, PhD ’06
October 4, 2007
Running Time: 2:00:40

Can human beings, with the help of smart machines, not merely avoid “collective idiocy” (in Sandy Pentland’s words), but actually achieve a degree of intelligence previously unattainable by either humans or machines alone? These three panelists study the possibilities from different angles.

Source: MITWorld video

This talk integrates Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework with Gunderson and Holling’s Cycle of Adaptive Change.

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Part three of a recent lecture given by Noah Raford at the London School of Economics Complexity Programme, on complexity science, management and organisational design.

This adds the time dimension to Snowden’s Framework and adds a strategic knowledge dimension to the Cycle of Adaptive Change. This provides queues for knowledge and action during different kinds of transition, which provides a theory-driven evidence base for strategic action during times of dynamics uncertainty.

Source: Slides and video from this and other talks can be found at http://news.noahraford.com/

Panarchy

Two features distinguish a panarchic representation from traditional hierarchical ones. The first is the importance of the adaptive cycle and, in particular the a phase as the engine of variety and the generator of new experiments within each level.  The second is the connections between levels. There are potentially multiple connections between phases at one level and phases at another level, but two are most significant in our search for the meaning of sustainability.  Those are the connections labeled as Revolt and Remember

Source: Resilliance Alliance

Woods Hole, MA, USA, June 2010: Noam Chomsky answers Z Media Institute student questions about a wide range of topics: climate change, Moaist rebels in Indias tribal areas, health care etc

Chomsky at ZMI

Noam Chomsky answers ZMI student questions at Woods Hole library from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.

Noam Chomsky ZMI student questions p2 from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.

What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness?

Government Transparency and Colloborative Journalism

Open Government Directive Agency Datasets

An underlying goal of the Open Government Initiative is to change the culture of information dissemination, institutionalizing a preference for making Federal data more widely available in more accessible formats. As one of the flagships of the Open Government Initiative, Data.gov is designed to facilitate access to Federal datasets that increase public understanding of Federal agencies and their operations, advance the missions of Federal agencies, create economic opportunity, and increase transparency, accountability, and responsiveness across the Federal Government – i.e., “high value” datasets. The Open Government Directive specifically required agencies to register at least three new high-value datasets on Data.gov by January 22. While many of the datasets submitted to Data.gov both before and after the January 22 deadline are high-value, agencies have reported those datasets denoted by asterisks in the tables below as new “high value” datasets in accordance with Open Government Directive provisions.

Source: Data.Gov

Linda Fantin and Ellen Miller, with moderator Chris Csikszentmihalyi

In December, the Obama administration directed (Open Government Directive) federal agencies and departments to implement “principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration,” including deadlines for providing government information online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources.

Our speakers Linda Fantin, director of public insight journalism at Minnesota Public Radio and Ellen Miller, executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, will explore this and related questions. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, moderates the discussion.

Source: MIT Tech TV

Transparency and Open Government

Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies
SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperateamong themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

Source: White House

The Fab Academy provides instruction and supervises investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication.

Just as communications and computation went from analog to digital, resulting in PCs and the Internet, the digitization of fabrication is leading to personal fabricators that will allow anyone to make almost anything, anywhere. The development of digital fabrication is based on creating codes that don’t just describe things, they are things, much as proteins are coded in molecular biology. This research roadmap is ultimately aiming at a Star Trek-style replicator, but prototype versions of these capabilities are already available in field “fab labs”.

Fab labs began as an outreach project from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), and spread around the world. The Fab Academy was launched to provide access to advanced instruction for students in these labs exceeding the educational resources locally available to them. It links groups of students and instructors in fab labs, with online video collaboration and lectures by a global faculty. Unlike remote instruction from a central campus, the digital fabrication tools in a fab lab effectively allow the campus to come to the student, for distributed rather than distance education.

Source: Fab Academy

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested?

sandy-pentland-emotions

The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based “honest signaling,” evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Professor Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland, is a leading figure at the MIT Media Lab and is a pioneer in the fields of organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. He co-directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets. In 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
This event took place on November 19, 2008

Design thinking is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result.[1] It is the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success. Unlike analytical thinking, design thinking is a creative process based around the “building up” of ideas. There are no judgments early on in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation in the ideation and prototype phases. Outside the box thinking is encouraged in these earlier processes since this can often lead to creative solutions. In organization and management theory, design thinking forms part of the A/D/A (Architecture/Design/Anthropology) paradigm, which characterizes innovative, human-centered enterprises. This management paradigm focuses on a collaborative and iterative style of work and an abductive mode of thinking, compared to the more traditional practices associated with the traditional M/E/P (Mathematics/Economics/Psychology) management paradigm. [2]

Source: Wikipedia

Not so long ago, Tim Brown recounts, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion.

At IDEO, a “design thinker” must not only be intensely collaborative, but “empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.” Since design flavors virtually all of our experiences, from products to services to spaces, a design thinker must explore a “landscape of innovation” that has to do with people, their needs, technology and business. Brown dips into three central “buckets” in the process of creating a new design: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

Design thinkers must set out like anthropologists or psychologists, investigating how people experience the world emotionally and cognitively. While designing a new hospital, IDEO staff stretched out on a gurney to see what the emergency room experience felt like. “You see 20 minutes of ceiling tiles,” says Brown, and realize the “most important thing is telling people what’s going on.” In a completely different venue, IDEO visited a NASCAR pit crew to come up with a more effective design for operating theaters.

After inspiration comes “building to think:” often a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process. Says Brown, “So many good ideas fail to make it out to market because they couldn’t navigate through the system.” IDEO counts on storytelling to develop and express its ideas, and to buy key players into the concept. Finally, IDEO relies on constantly refreshing its sources of inspiration by bringing in bold thinkers to campus, and increasingly, focusing on socially oriented design problems.

Source: MITWORLD

The President challenges America to lead the global economy in clean energy in order to create new jobs at home, free us from dependence on foreign oil, and make us more secure. October 23, 2009
(public domain)


Source: Whitehouse

Cartagen 0.5 Demo from Jeffrey Warren on Vimeo.

The Cartagen project is led by researchers at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, but we welcome contributions from anyone.

Cartagen is a vector-based, client-side framework for rendering maps in native HTML 5. Written in JavaScript, it uses the new Canvas element to load mapping data from various sources, including OpenStreetMap.

In short, Cartagen lets you make beautiful, customized maps with a simple stylesheet.

Maps are styled with Geographic Style Sheets (GSS), a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information – a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible. However, GSS is a scripting language as well, making Cartagen an ideal framework for mapping dynamic data. See About Gss and Gss Usage for more on GSS.

Mobile devices and networks have made possible distributed reporting of geographic and temporal data, from unfolding natural disasters to organizing protests in real time. Cartagen allows users to integrate real time data streams and display them in novel ways.

Cartagen can display maps that change based on live data streams.

It also offers the possibility of rendering OpenStreetMap data which is not currently efficient with tile-based systems – such as authorship and time data. A simple but useful example is that Cartagen can show live OpenStreetMap data – in the sense that viewers see edits occurring in real time, with no rendering load on the server.

With powerful mapping tools such as these, there is an opportunity for users to create their own maps – not just pushpins and overlays, but completely designed maps which incorporate rich and dynamic data, and most of all maps which tell stories. Instead of a single canonical map for everyone, individuals and communities can make locally and personally relevant maps.


Source: Cartagen Wiki

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