[Ci4cg-announce] Invitation to join the Collective Intelligence for the Common Good Community / Network

[Doug Schuler]

GREETINGS!

We agreed at the workshop that anybody in the community / network could invite others. 

If you know of other people who might be interested, here's an invitation that you can use. Please invite 2 or 3 people!

More info on our  special issue will be coming soon...

Thanks from rainy Seattle. 

— Doug


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ i n v i t a t i o n ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Invitation to join the Collective Intelligence for the Common Good Community / Network 

We would like to invite you to participate in a new research and action community network that focuses on Collective Intelligence for the Common Good. We believe that an explicit commitment to the common good will help focus and integrate our collective efforts. The hope is that our collaborative efforts will help engender progress towards addressing humankind's shared challenges. 

Our first group event was a workshop in London in September, 2014. Approximately 30 people attended that event and 30 or so people contributed position papers. Based on that event we now have an opportunity to publish our work in a dedicated edition of the journal AI & Society. A call for contributions is now in work and will be distributed soon to this group. In that special issue we plan to present our work and explore ways that our work could be integrated, as well as how it could be used in addressing actual real-world challenges. We hope that this will be first of many collaborate efforts. 

We plan to continue this work beyond these specific opportunities through a variety of approaches that are outlined in our Statement of Principles (below) and, especially through engagement among our members. The Statement of Principles presents our commitment to engagement, multiplicity of perspectives and approaches, support and promotion of the integration of related efforts, and the actual design and implementation of socio-technological systems, media, policy, events, critiques, social actions, etc. Our web site should be available in early 2015. Ultimately it will have links to the projects of our members as well as documents and news. 

Members of our community / network are engaged in a wide number of projects including deliberative and systems, empirical research, policy development, community networks, etc. etc. By building on these efforts, we plan to explore and implement a variety of approaches towards lightweight coordination, in which relatively small efforts by all of us can result in big wins for all of us — and the greater public. 

If you are interested in at least hearing about this work, the easiest way to proceed is to register on our email distribution site, http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce.

Thanks for your interest!


~~~~~~~~~~~
Collective Intelligence for the Common Good Community / Network 
Statement of Principles, May 23, 2014

This statement is a statement of broad directions, principles and aims, not an oath that demands full compliance. 

In light of this theme, a need for a statement of this kind seems obvious. 

The statement is intended to help focus and reinforce research and action that is directed primarily at the conscious, cooperative efforts of people in this diffuse community to explore, understand, develop, and promote collective intelligence for the common good. In this statement we use the expression “common good” to mean something that approximates a universal benefit, something that everybody — in theory — would want. Admittedly imprecise — like many of the words we commonly use, such as democracy or community — the pursuit of the common good will generally mean finding peaceful ways to resolve conflict, building a more equitable society, securing a healthy and diverse environment for ourselves and future generations, and respecting cultural diversity. 

Here, the means align with the ends. We believe that this focus is likely to require a redesign of our some of our own approaches, including what we construe to be our own sphere of influence. Further we believe that modeling the world we’d like to see can provide invaluable insights that won’t arrive in time any other way. 

With the challenges and opportunities afforded by the Internet and other information and communication technologies at this historical juncture, the development of a broader community or network becomes more-or-less necessary if civic society is to establish and hold any influence over the establishment and governance of information and communication systems, resources, and policies that are open, allow unhindered access to information, and encourage civic problem solving. Our goals include advancing research and more action-oriented approaches in a number of relevant directions at the same time. 

As members of civil society who are not coordinated directly through government or business dictates, indirectly through the market, or through coercion, we recognize that informal associations, sharing, and responsibility, will be necessary if we are to organize effectively in the face of challenges to the health of the planet and the people that inhabit it. 

Beyond conducting research and developing tools, services, policy, and the like, we are hoping to build the circumstances that help promote this work and the orientation in the world. For one thing, this perspective compels us to think about the inclusive community that this work requires, one that will necessarily be more focused and integrated and organized than currently exists.

Our hope is to consciously and organically nurture this community / network. One approach would be to proceed largely through the actions of members inviting potential members. (One research issue introduced here for our own edification is whether this approach could help instill and reinforce the norms and values that hopefully propel this project.) The intent of this conscious community development is of course not to build a gated community, but to help focus attention on relevant issues including how best to engage the “outside” world and maintain porous borders.

In a general way, a member of the community would agree to: 

	• Emphasize work that is explicitly and conscientiously intended to advance the common good;
	• Think about how their work complements other work of the community — and consciously work to integrate or complement that work and extend its effectiveness in the real world (some examples are listed in the next paragraph);
	• Engage in online and other conversations with the rest of the community on a regular basis; 
	• Focus on the organization and processes of the community in addition to the specific areas in which you specialize; and
	• Endeavor to use the tools and systems developed by people in the community both as part of our community obligations and and as a way to help improve the functionality and effectiveness of the tools and systems, and hence our potential effectiveness. 

We envision the work that falls into the heading of “Collective Intelligence for the Common Good” in an extremely broad way: it includes research and action and products such as deliberative systems, research enterprises and case studies, think tanks, model policy documents, curricula, ruminations and epistles, thought experiments, art works, and many others. While this in no way abandons the idea of rigorous research, it consciously seeks to integrate and build upon other perspectives. We hope to transcend the limits (constraints? Inertia?) of many dominant habits, institutions, norms, and folkways that we routinely face, especially when their strict obedience compels us to work in ways that are likely to be ineffective in addressing the common good of the planet and its inhabitants. 

Finally, without being unduly legalistic we’d like also to ultimately “franchise” this work, enabling a multiplicity of systems, resources, events, experiments, etc, etc. — but, still, with the intent of integrating the work into the whole. 


Original Signatories

Fiorella De Cindio, University of Milan, Italy
Mark Klein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US
Anna De Liddo, Open University, UK
Douglas Schuler, The Evergreen State College, US
Simon Buckingham Shum, University of Technology Sydney, Australia


Please direct comments or questions regarding this effort to douglas at publicsphereproject.org