WiserWorldWeb.org is an effort to bring together people who are advancing the collective understanding of collective intelligence.
It is a space where a wide variety of thinkers can share their thought on collective wisdom, collective learning, organizational learning, swarm intelligence, complex adaptive systems, crowd resources, social change, cultural change, economic development, and related subjects.
The world’s problems are now so complex that our existing systems for solving them too often are proving inadequate. So we first need to improve those systems’ abilities to perceive, understand, and address problems. At the kernel of most of our problems is the problem of how to improve our collective intelligence.
As it is, there is much opportunity in the rapidly emerging communications and computing technologies. Look at the Internet, Wikipedia, Google, the exponential growth in computer technologies. These forms of collective intelligence all are greatly increasing our capacities to work together to address problems.
Fortunately, the emerging tools are being used to understand Collective Intelligence in new ways. Researchers from cognitive science, computer science, sociology, organizational theory, biology, anthropology, political science and other fields are discovering many aspects of the dynamics of collective intelligence.
But more can be done to cohere and quicken the diverse discoveries. The CI 2014 conference on Collective Intelligence is paving the way by bringing together hundreds of thinkers from different disciplines to exchange ideas about the central question of what makes groups of any kind intelligent or stupid. The more intelligent the community of CI scholars becomes, the more quickly can their insights be applied in address societal problems. So it will be interesting to find out what is the collective wisdom of this diverse group about how to nurture CI as a field of inquiry, as an emerging discipline. WiserWorldWeb will try to help in this by conducting surveys and doing interviews at the conference.
But what then? The participants are likely to go away with post-partum blues for not having more opportunity to continue the exciting dialogues. So WiserWorldWeb will offer a space where researchers can easily continue to share ideas. And as the site grows, it will become a forum for deliberation for an expanding community of thinkers.
WiserWorldWeb.org is a new site, and much remains to be done to realize the possibilities. But it hopes to be one part of the effort to increase humanity’s collective intelligence.
