Collective Intelligence: Going Deep

Collective Intelligence (CI). Hmmm. It is a concept oft-bandied about but I'm not really sure what it means. According to my first-stop reference resource of choice, Wikipedia, it says the following:

Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computers. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer science, and of mass behavior — a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies.

My desire to develop a more concrete understanding of CI is the direct result of being invited to attend CI Foo Camp at Googleplex tomorrow through Saturday. Pretty cool. After looking at the list of attendees, I truly feel like a pretender in their midst. That said, I'll do my best to contribute to the proceedings. Per the CI Foo Wiki, here is their operating definition of CI:

While "collective intelligence" can be defined quite broadly, we're using it to describe instances of networked computers and humans working together to solve interesting problems.CI Foo attendees are working on various projects and products that leverage collective intelligence.

If you look at the tag clouds relating to topics of interest, topics people want to hear about and topics to which people can contribute, the big winner in each of the three categories is "prediction markets." That's fine, I get it. But to me there is a big piece missing, a piece I think about all the time: how does influence ripple across social networks? Because I don't personally conceive of CI as akin to "wisdom of the crowds," where in effect CI is simply an extension of polling. This is part of it. But where does the wisdom come from? Does it simply spring forth from a large number of autonomous entities operating in a vacuum and expressing their own opinions? Or are there influences that play upon people before they vote, before they act with their feet or their wallet? Clearly it is the latter; this is akin to comparing microeconomics to macroeconomics, where one field is predicated upon a raft of simplifying assumptions (the "rational man") while the other seeks to understand the larger world for what it is - complex, interdependent and ever-changing.

Going into CI Foo my operating thesis is that collective intelligence is a direct result of a smaller number of influencers that help catalyze the dialog, around which discussion and debate takes place that eventually yields a collective and reflective result. But the difference between groupthink and my conception of CI is that the influencers change all the time depending upon the topic, the context, the timing and their network status (or reputation), and that the topics get thoroughly debated, tested and argued within and across communities. And this is the way it should be.

So one of my goals is to really dig into this area and to further gel my thoughts around expert networks, how they can best be built and operated for fun and profit. Gerson Lehrman has had it going for quite some time. LinkedIn is on the cusp of leveraging their millions of nodes to a similar end. But even with these two behemoths going at it my sense is that there is much, much more to be done. I will bounce some ideas around with my brilliant and erudite co-campers this weekend and report back next week.