Framework for Augmenting the Collective Intelligence of the Ecosystem of Commons Initiatives

George Pór, from Commons Knowledge Alliance, CommunityIntelligence Ltd. (UK), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), presents the following article at the commons conference in Hyderabad, on Wednesday.

Abstract : Commons are sustained by “communities working together in self-governing ways in order to protect resources from enclosure or to build new openly-shared resources.” (Hess, Ch. ….) Successful self-governance in any large-scale commons needs shared knowledge and collective intelligence. Only then will it be capable to meet the combined challenges of complexity and the urgency of making wise decisions.

The larger and more complex the commons population, the more emphasized is the need for the commoners to build capacity for cultivating such faculties of their collective intelligence as collective sensing, meaning-making, planning, shared memory, and collaborative foresight.

In response to humankind’s global crises, there’s a multitude of commons-strengthening citizen initiatives at every scale, from local to global, and in every area of social life. They form an emergent ecosystem, in which they can interact, share information and grow collective capabilities.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Commons – What Is it?
Collective Intelligence
Capability Building for Augmenting Collective Intelligence
Using the U Process to Strengthen the Faculties of Collective Intelligence
Commons, Innovation Ecosystem and Innovation Architecture
Commons Knowledge Alliance: Prototyping a Socio-Semantic Space
Select Questions for Further Research
Literature Cited

INTRODUCTION

What time is it?

We are living in a time, when multiple crises affect humankind’s social body and institutions. Work, commerce, governance, healthcare, education, and all other areas of human endeavor, they are all becoming targets for profound innovation, by social and technical innovators, their networks, and social movements for change.

There are societal macro-trends that point to a commons-based society, as reflected in the writings Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler (Benkler, 2006), and such social theorists as Christian Siefkes (Siefkes, 2007), (Merentz, 2010) and David Bollier, author of the Viral Spiral (Bollier, 2008). They all point to the emergence of the commons as the third main coordinating force of society, besides the state and markets.
The success of this new (and at the same time, very old) form of social life will depend on its capacity to augment the collective intelligence and full creative potential of its inhabitants. This paper outlines a conceptual scaffold for that augmentation.

Motivation

“If the transition to intentional evolution does not occur, evolution on this planet will stall, and humanity will not contribute positively to the future evolution of life in the universe–we will be a failed evolutionary experiment…Conscious organisms will need to envision the planetary society and design strategies to get there. If it is left to chance, it will not happen…” (Stewart, 2008)

We want to contribute to the intentional evolution of society, by developing a framework for augmenting the collective intelligence in the ecosystem of global commons. They are commons formed by commoners focusing on defending and strengthening global resources of mind, life and matter (Quilligan, 2010)

COMMONS — WHAT IS IT?

In scholarly literature there are hundreds of definitions of commons. In this paper, we’ll work with a set of descriptors for the commons, developed by leading practitioners and commons advocates, which may lack academic rigor but can facilitate better the dialogue of commons theory and practice. They are:

“Commons” embraces all the creations of nature and society that we inherit jointly and freely, and hold in trust for future generations.
http://onthecommons.org/sites/default/files/stateofthecommons.pdf 
The Commons refers to resources that are collectively owned. This can include everything from land to software. The process by which the commons are transformed into private property is often termed enclosure.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_commons
The commons consists of any common resource that is available to all (but this notion can be defined locally, or specifically as ‘everybody in category x’), and as such there are many type of commons but basically two: physical resources or man-made.

http://p2pfoundation.net/Commons#Description

Those descriptors apply to most types of commons at any scale. A special category is what’s called the “global commons.” It is defined as follows:

“While the term ‘commons’ has been in use for centuries in one context or another, the ‘global commons’ is a recent construct and has several meanings: (1) those resources that are shared by all of humanity, such as the sky, the oceans, the internet, human knowledge, or even the planet itself; (2) the sum of all various local and regional commons across the world; and (3) an operating assumption espousing that the natural resources of the earth and the cultural resources of humanity are to be sustainably and equitably stewarded for the benefit of all, both now and in the future.” (Commons Knowledge Alliance, 2010)

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Just as any complex phenomena, “collective intelligence” (abbreviated as CI) can be looked at through many lenses and doing so, each time, we will discover different meanings defined by their discipline-specific context or scope.

The scopes that are particularly relevant to the intent of this writing are the evolutionary, socio-semantic, and cognitive.

Evolutionary scope of collective intelligence

“Collective intelligence” refers to the capacity of human groups of any size to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such “innovation mechanism” triads as variation-feedback-selection, differentiation-integration-transformation, and competition-cooperation-coopetition.

Evolution may not have a goal, but its direction towards higher order complexity is widely observed and popularized by systems theory and the sciences of self-organization and complex adaptive systems in biology, economics, politics, language and management. Evolution is the unfolding of social holons in that direction, thanks to the innovation mechanism mentioned earlier. Thus, the evolution of any social holon— be it a community of commoners, nations, or humankind itself—entirely depends on its capacity to harmonize its innovation triads.

One can also look at evolutionary CI as a repertory of high-level, compound capabilities. Through that lens, this is what can be seen: “The capability of a collective/social system to hold questions and language too complex for any individual intelligence to hold, and to work out strategies, visions, goals, and images of a desired future, etc.” (Voldtofte, F. 1997)

The evolutionary scope is our broadest context for understanding CI. Continually increasing its evolutionary CI is vital to the sustainability and thriveablity of any social holon in the conditions of accelerating changes in its habitat. Future-responsive commons governance steers adequate attention and resources to boost the commons’ evolutionary CI, which is needed to match the increasing complexity in its broader social environment.

Socio-semantic scope of collective intelligence

The concept of socio-semantic CI is derived from the Social Semantic Web that “subsumes developments in which social interactions on the Web lead to the creation of explicit and semantically rich knowledge representations. The Social Semantic Web can be seen as a Web of collective knowledge systems, which are able to provide useful information based on human contributions and which get better as more people participate.” (Gruber, 2006)

Based on the above, we define the socio-semantic scope of collective intelligence as the one, in which social, conceptual, and technological systems co-evolve over time. When their interaction is designed for high synergy, it can power up the cognitive scope of CI.

To realize that possibility, the commons (and other social holons) interested in boosting their CI need to develop collective sensing and meaning-making organs and processes. For example: Mahatma Gandhi, discovered and appreciated that one cannot build a social movement without a newspaper that acts as a mirror and a catalyst to its collective consciousness. His visionary genius today, would inspire the creation of socio-semantic web platforms for the commons to grow collaborative problem-solving and co-creation capabilities.

Cognitive scope of collective intelligence

“The expression ‘collective intelligence’ relates to an extensive body of knowledge and thoughts concerned with several objects that have been diversely labeled: distributed cognition, distributed knowledge systems, global brain, super-brain, global mind, group mind, ecology of mind, hive mind, learning organization, connected intelligence, networked intelligence, augmented intelligence, hyper-cortex, symbiotic man, etc. Notwithstanding their diversity, these several rich philosophical and scientific contemporary trends have one feature in common: they describe human communities, organizations and cultures exhibiting ‘mind-like’ properties, such as learning, perceiving, acting, thinking, problem-solving, and so on.” (Lévy, 2003a)

“Intelligence refers to the main cognitive powers: perception, action planning and coordination, memory, imagination and hypothesis generation, inquisitiveness and learning abilities. The expression ‘collective intelligence’ designates the cognitive powers of a group.” (Lévy, 2003a)

The cognitive scope of CI outlined in those quotes describes a model of CI, which is, in reality, never acting alone, without the collective emotional and spiritual intelligence.

“[E]mphasis on cognition does not intend to diminish the essential roles of emotions, bodies, medias, sign systems, social relations, technologies, biological environment or physical support in collective intelligence processes. The study of collective intelligence constitutes an inter-discipline aspiring as much to a dialogue between human and social sciences as with the technical, artistic and spiritual traditions. Its goal is to understand and improve collective learning and the creative process.” (Lévy, 2003b)

Seen through the evolutionary, socio-semantic and cognitive scopes, augmenting CI calls for meeting different requirements in each of the three scopes.

CAPABILITY BUILDING FOR AUGMENTING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Building capacity for boosting a common’s CI, in each of those scopes, is essential to its capacity to delight its stakeholders, thus to its long-term viability.

Today’s open-source knowledge and collaboration technologies provide more and ever better tools for augmenting the CI in commons. Many features of advanced software in the Enterprise 2.0 category can be combined with open source tools to deliver the combined affordances of the two worlds. Then what is missing?

The most frequently unmet condition for CI boosting is the explicit principles, practices and pattern languages, relevant to the three scopes.

Principles

“By principle I mean a behavioral aspiration of the community, a clear, unambiguous statement of a fundamental belief about how the whole and all the parts intend to conduct themselves in pursuit of the purpose. A principle is a precept against which all structures, decisions, actions, and results will be judged. A principle always has high ethical and moral content.” (Hock, 1999)

The principles derived from and guiding life in commons need to be explicit and supported by the commons’ culture. Only then they can play a positive role in CI augmentation.

Practices

“Practices are those repeated actions that are taken mindfully, which WHEN DONE AS PRACTICES alter a complex condition or situation. By “when done as practices”, we mean that they are done frequently and regularly, with mindfulness.  Meditation is a practice.  Speaking straight is a practice.”  (source: email from Michael McMaster )

A commons wanting to boost its CI to match the complexity of program design, planning, governance, and policy advocacy efforts can do that only if collaborative knowledge development practices are continually invented/discovered, used, and improved. The emphasis is not on having the ‘right’ practices but having explicit ones that are exercised and open to question about.

Pattern languages

“A pattern is a named nugget of insight that conveys the essence of a proven solution to a recurring problem within a certain context.” (from Patterns and Software: Essential Concepts and Terminology, by Brad Appleton) 2000 http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/docs/patterns-intro.html

“Many patterns form a language. Just as words must have grammatical and semantic relationships to each other in order to make a spoken language useful, design patterns must be related to each other in order to form a pattern language.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language

For example, a pattern language for commons governance will be a structured method of describing practices worth replicating in different areas and phases of governance work.

Pattern language can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of such functions as: scanning international efforts relevant to a complex issue at hand; building community knowledge gardens, also known as “dynamic knowledge repositories.” (Engelbart, 1992)

It can serve the commons as an interface that connects practitioners, experts, and civil society organizations, and also, as a key resource to work through issues in any domain, in workshops, conferences, unconferences, and online forums.

USING THE U PROCESS TO STRENGTHEN THE FACULTIES OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

The U process is a social technology for learning from the future as it emerges. (Scharmer, 2007) . Collective intelligence is not a static thing but an emergent, always-becoming quality of social holons. Its faculties include: collective sensing, meaning-making, planning, shared memory, and collaborative foresight.

The following questions are examples of augmentation issues organized by the 5 cycles of the U:

Co-initiation

When forming a new commons, what tools and practices will help its members moving from a collection of intelligences to collective intelligence?

How can a large group of diverse commoners, using visual maps of their diverse mental models, discover common ground and shared intent?


Co-sensing

When a commons issue has multiple stakeholders engaged in parallel or sequential conversations, what are the best known methods to connect and synergize them, help them making sense out of and appreciate each other’s contribution?

What pattern-seeking practices yield good maps of beneficial relationships in the socio-semantic web of those conversations?

Co-presencing

What methods of collective self-reflexivity are effective in raising the commons’ self-awareness to the level of discovering its highest potential?

How to cultivate the collective intuition needed to connect with a desired future already present in germ form in the present conditions?

Co-creation

How can natural and new commons co-author new narratives that will help them taking their space as agents of social coordination, next to the state and markets?

How to define the requirements for the forms and media the most suitable to create, adapt, and iterate innovative solutions to commons challenges?

Co-evolving

What practices, supported by social media, are particularly effective in facilitating peer to peer learning and communities of practice in the commons?

How can commons grow a high-diversity ecosystem of relationships with other commons, through harmonizing their innovation architecture?

COMMONS, INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM AND INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE

Each commons is at the center of its “ecosystem that connects people and their institutions across boundaries and that interweaves the different spheres of activity and relationship through seeing from the whole.” (Scharmer, 2007)

It is the vitality and CI of that ecosystem, which is the source its sustainability and thriving. To increase both it is necessary to cultivate a systemic approach to reach and maintain a dynamic balance between the whole and its parts. We outlined that approach in the Innovation Architecture section of our chapter on communities of practice. (Pór, 2005)

“The science and art of architecture lie in skillfully relating parts to a greater whole, creating a form uniquely appropriate for the exercise of a specific set of functions.” (Helgesen, 1995)

The commons, this ancient form of managing production resources held in common by producers, is returning in the new century, at a higher level of complexity, capable to bring innovation in multiple domains.

The innovation architecture of each commons is different from the one used somewhere else, but the innovation architecture framework that we suggest provides some common benefits to all. It integrates social, economic, learning, and technology innovation into a coherent whole.

Those four cardinal dimensions may also be coupled with aesthetic innovation. “Aesthetic” refers to beauty not in the sense of decoration/ornament but the qualities of appreciation, inspiration, and mindfulness present as values in the commons’ culture. They ask themselves, what is needed for cultivating those qualities at every instance in the life of the commons, so that the results of the other four dimensions can become more than the sum of their parts.

A carefully constructed innovation architecture allows the commons to:

- Accelerate its innovation cycle
- Reduce mistakes in innovation management, which are due to not accounting for the complexity of radical innovation and what is required to harmonize the interaction across its four domains
- Orient evaluation of choices and trade-offs among numerous innovation options
- Let spontaneous emergence co-evolve with intentional design in innovation projects (Pór, 1995)

COMMONS KNOWLEDGE ALLIANCE: PROTOTYPING A SOCIO-SEMANTIC SPACE

To augment their CI, commons initiatives and projects need a collective knowledge system able to provide useful information for commons decisions, collective sensing and meaning-making, planning, shared memory, and collaborative foresight.

A knowledge system, designed as a socio-semantic space, becomes better as more people use and contribute to it. In that space and “embodied” by a virtual environment, community co-evolves with its shared knowledge, which is enabled by a technology layer.

The functions of the virtual environment are to support collective sensing, meaning-making, shared learning, problem-solving, and co-creation. The Commons Knowledge Alliance (CKA), a project sponsored by Notre Dame University, Anthroposphere Institute, and CommunityIntelligence, will be the first prototype designed to amplify those “collective intelligence” capabilities.

Its intended beneficiary is all those wanting to learn about the commons. In its first version, CKA is a collection of indexed and tagged knowledge resources and educational programs, and conversations that can also seed and feed communities of practice.

How does the Commons Knowledge Alliance work?

“The Commons Knowledge Alliance is itself a commons. This requires each of us to take responsibility for making the alliance as valuable a resource as possible. We do this by making suggestions for improvements, contributing where possible, volunteering to teach a course or lead a discussion group…

1. It’s a Commons. The Commons Knowledge Alliance is itself a commons. This requires each of us to take responsibility for making the alliance as valuable a resource as possible. We do this by making suggestions for improvements, contributing where possible, volunteering to teach a course or lead a discussion group, and recommending the Alliance to others.

2. It’s Open Source. This means that the assets and courses on the site, unless otherwise noted, belong to all the members of the commons. You can use these assets in your own work, as well as distribute them to others.

3. Relationships Matter. The commons comes alive through relationships—the lively interactions that we have with each other. We learn from each other, challenge each other, help each other. In doing so, we come to appreciate that we are, in the words of Martin Luther King, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

4. A Radical Inquiry. The Commons Knowledge Alliance explores the premise that all life is an indivisible unity. And this unity is not some advanced state that we evolve into. Rather, it is a priori or prior to any divisions or difference-making mental or social structures that we tend to overlay on reality. In practice, this means that our decisions, behaviors, and actions take the totality into account, and we operate for the good of the whole. We invite you to join with us in a fearless, unbounded exploration of the implications and possibilities of this presumption.” (Commons Knowledge Alliance, 2010)

The structure of the CKA beta site includes a Knowledge Garden and forums for online conversations. The Knowledge Garden contains hundreds of wikipages with a glossary and documents related to:
- Movement Sense-Making
- Introduction to the Commons
- The Enclosure of the Commons
- A New Vision of the Commons
- Toward a Commons-based Society
- Resources and Tools for Commons

The Commons Campus of CKA is offering “An Introduction to the Global Commons” a 4-week long online course. The interaction hub of CKA is the forums space, where the initial conversations include discussions about the commons in the Common Course of June 2010, and self-organized social learning.

SELECT QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

1. What are the first principles of augmenting collective intelligence in the selected scopes of CI: evolutionary, socio-semantic, and cognitive?

2. In what ways can biomimicry application areas extend from industry sectors to community knowledge gardens?

“Biomimicry follows Life’s Principles. Life’s Principles instruct us to: build from the bottom up, self-assemble, optimize rather than maximize, use free energy, cross-pollinate, embrace diversity, adapt and evolve, use life-friendly materials and processes, engage in symbiotic relationships, and enhance the bio-sphere. By following the principles life uses, you can create products and processes that are well adapted to life on earth.” (Biomimicry Guild, 2008)

Biomimicry has been used primarily in industrial design and the development of new materials. As biomimicry expands from product and process design as application areas, to affect the design of social, knowledge, and technological ecosystems, t he question becomes: What can we learn from nature’s ecosystems, which would provide useful metaphors and models to the design of federated courses as social ecosystems?

3. How can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) about the commons benefit from recent advances in “knowledge federation” theory and practice?

MOOCs are new, connectivist form of social learning enabled by Web 2.0 and Education 2.0 technologies.

“Once our course is done here, others will hopefully learn from our experience and build on it. Spiralling innovation. But I’m hoping we won’t only see people building on our work. I hope we’ll see others building with us … Research opportunities are enormous. MOOCs are uncharted, largely undocumented, territory.” (Siemens, 2008)

“Knowledge federation,” as it applies to educational design, refers to courses, where the learning resources are co-created by experts and students internationally, and offered to learners worldwide. Instead of having to create an entire textbook or lecture slides, an instructor is able to focus on a single lecture or even a part of a lecture, and render it through cooperation with creative video artists, animators and communicators, who are also members of the federation. The learning resources are created and kept up to date by the people who have the best knowledge of the subject matter. The learners too participate in the creation, evaluation and ‘digestion’ of the knowledge resources, completing in that way a well-functioning knowledge ecosystem.” (Knowledge Federation, 2009)

LITERATURE CITED
Benkler, Y. (2006) Wealth of Networks
Biomimicry Guild (2008) What Is Biomimicry? http://www.biomimicryguild.com/guild_biomimicry.html
Bollier, D. (2008) Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own
Commons Knowledge Alliance (2010) Source Document, version 4.2
http://www.commonsknowledgealliance.org/about-us
Engelbart, D. (1992) Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware
Gruber, T. (2006). ”Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web”. Keynote presentation at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference
Helgesen, S. (1995) The Web of Inclusion: a New Architecture for Building Great Organizations
Hess, Ch. (xxxx) Mapping the New Commons, by Charlotte Hess
Hock, D. (1999) Birth of the Chaordic Age, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Knowledge Federation (2009) Knowledge Federation course http://knowledgefederation.org/Knowledge_federation_course
Lévy, P. (2003a) Frequently Asked Questions about collective intelligence, http://tinyurl.com/2r2jgr
Lévy, P. (2003b) Strategy to build a CI network (manuscript)
Merentz, S. (2010) The Generative Logic of the Commons
http://www.keimform.de/2010/the-generative-logic-of-the-commons-slidecast/
Pór, G. (1995) Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice, in Community Building: Renewing Spirit and Learning in Business, New Leaders Press, San Francisco
Pór, G. (2008) Collective Intelligence and Collective Leadership: Twin Paths to Beyond Chaos, A PrimaVera working paper, Universiteit van Amsterdam http://sprouts.aisnet.org/8-2/
Quilligan, J. (2010) The Commons of Mind, Life and Matter: Toward a Non-Polar Framework for Global Negotiations, Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer 2010
Scharmer, O. (2007) Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. Society for Organizational Learning, Cambridge
Siefkes, Ch. (2007) From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World, downloadable here: http://peerconomy.org/wiki/Main_Page
Siemens, G. (2008) MOOC or Mega-Connectivism Course, http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=53
Stewart, J. (2008). The Evolutionary Manifesto: Our role in the future evolution of life.
Voldtofte, F. (1997) A Generative Theory on Collective Intelligence, http://tinyurl.com/3xk4yy

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