Anticipate: Collective Intelligence Design - Beyond the Event

[alberto]

@soenke

Because almost all participants spoke German (and all events were conducted in German), I am afraid that it is somewhat unlikely that our local follow-up discussions (of which there are quite a few, see below) will find their way to this platform. While event registration was set up on edgeryders for German-speaking participants, online registration was not often used, instead participants contacted the organizing team via email.

[…] how difficult it is to create conversations for people who bring concerns and interests but have little patience for the kind of academic exchanges that may or may not operate well within the boundaries and logics of academia but certainly don’t easily open up to create welcoming atmospheres for first-timers.

Yeah, story of my life. Back in 2013, we started looking into early Western monasticism as a possible solution to this. The idea is:

1. Optimize human-to-human communication protocols for working together.
2. Be open to any newcomer, but insist on the protocol being non-negotiable.

We know from cultural evolution biology (for example Joseph Enrich and E. O. Wilson) that human evolution is driven by group selection, as well as individual selection. In the evolutionary history of homo sapiens, there is a clear pattern: the groups that are best at collaborating (while being able to protect themselves from free riders) win.

Since Edgeryders’ “hello world” post in 2011, we have been constantly asked for smoother user experience, lower-effort onboarding, and, yes, multiple languages. We have tried to accommodate, with various degrees of success. Eight years on, the jury is still out about the ROI of all that work. There is a tradeoff: when you create a fun, nice event, more people will join it than would be willing to discuss on online platform, so that’s a win. The loss is that these people are now mostly going to communicate with each other at the scale of the event (in the tens of people) as opposed to those who are using the platform (in the thousands of people). The interaction breaks down, and I am convinced that the intelligence in “collective intelligence” is in the interaction, in all but the trivial cases (like guessing the weight of a pig at the Plymouth country fair).

In principle, there is a solution: highly modular, but still connected, interaction networks. These are instantiated by people being in the small worlds of local events, and connecting them with the larger world of the online discussion, like you, @soenke, are doing here. In practice, these solutions work more by art than by science, and we have not completely cracked the problem yet.