Category: community

From the Archives: A call for wiser research on collective wisdom

A group of people sitting on the floor in a circle in conversation

The amazing Tom Atlee wrote a post in 2014 calling for wiser research on collective wisdom. It is a powerful piece of writing and still worth your time to click on the link. What sticks with me is his attention to the need for (and inherent messiness) of including diverse voices in collective wisdom. From the days of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the voices and conversations that emerged, we need to consider Tom’s ideas more than ever.

Here is a teaser to get you started…

I take issue with another major assumption of the “wisdom of crowds” thesis advanced by James Surowiecki, author of The WIsdom of Crowds – specifically, his bias against conversation, dialogue, and deliberation. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen summarizes that assumption as follows: “Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.”

This principle exhibits a profound ignorance of the varieties of communication and conversation – an ignorance that prevents researchers in the field from even glimpsing – to say nothing of clarifying – more comprehensive and authentic forms of collective intelligence and wisdom. Most forms of collective intelligence and wisdom are deeply dependent on the interaction of diverse entities, usually in the form of conversation.

When Surowiecki and his followers speak out against communication among the guesstimators in a “wisdom of crowds” exercise, what they are actually speaking out against (without realizing it) are interactions that reduce the level of diversity in the system. What produces the crowd’s accurate collective answers is aggregation of its non-manipulated diversity. This is one way to “use diversity creatively” – a central feature of collective intelligence. But this “wisdom of crowds” aggregation approach is limited to getting collective answers to questions of fact – including predictions (future facts) and currently unknown facts (like the location of a sunken submarine).

via A call for wiser research on collective wisdom.

Update on the Blog Draft Archives Project

a picture from a balcony looking down at people walking, watching, connecting at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
People watching, people connecting…

Of the original 419 blog post drafts, 76 drafts remain. From the first post of this silly project in early December until today’s post, I’ve revived/edited or nearly simply reposted 68 posts. That nearly eclipses my early blogging frenzy in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when I posted snippets nearly daily… many of those posts are now inaccessible due to transitions of blog archives, but they are not lost. One day I will figure out if I should (and how to) reconnect them here.

I am now posting 2-3 per week. Of the remaining drafts, I estimate there are up to 40-50 viable posts. Some require real work, others just some light editing. Probably fewer of the latter. I’ve weeded out most of the drafts that refer to links that are now broken, unable to connect to the sources that inspired the post. That makes me sad.

Happily, some of you have left comments and we have reconnected — sweetness. It reminded me of the importance of leaving comments. Euan Semple, I keep trying to comment on your blog, but I fear I have so many different WordPress identities, I keep failing at logging on. I will work on that but I’ve posted imaginary comments quite a few times in the past few months. Harold Jarche, I was thrilled you were happy to get a comment from me on YOUR blog. Ton, Alan, Darcy, Joitske, Mark, Christy, Monica, Robyn, Patrick, and Stephen, thanks for your comments so far. The 10 of you give me more energy than you might imagine!

From the Archives: Planting Trees, Investing in Ecosystems

From the blog draft archives 2014. This one is posted as written in 2014…

You know that feeling when ideas keep converging? It has been happening to me lately. And the central theme that shows up for me is investment — investment in people, communities, ecosystems, organizations.  There is too much for one post, so let me start by planting a few seeds in your mental garden.

Looking up the twisted trunks of a 100 year old big leaf maple tree with blue sky behind. No leaves.

Last week on our beloved Seattle Farm Coop email list (yes, an urban farm coop!) there was a discussion on native plants.  Why they are valuable. How to grow them. Then this post came in from Emily (used with permission .  The emphasis in bold and clarifications in italics are mine  because things lose context out of context!):

Oh Elder…we appreciate you! (referring to elderberry)

Yes on Burnt Ridge (a Western Washington plant nursery)! Their site makes notes on fruiting plants for shade
For seeds couldn’t say enough beautiful things about Horizon Herbs. http://www.horizonherbs.com/. They have varieties of Elderberry seeds. I started some seeds this fall…red, blue and black…so we’ll see how they do. (sending them love now!) Will post on Market Days when plants start emerging from their rest. I can’t describe the feelings of starting trees from seed…but for me, they come from the most inside places. Unpredictably moving, significant, precious.
Emily

 In the whole message, she demonstrated appreciation and network connecting practices. Beautiful. But in that last sentence Emily caught, in her last sentence, what I SENSE about online communities and made me recall the early, deep and significant experiences I had online in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  It was in the leap of faith to invest in people. Simply go for it.

I had time to do that in the “early days.” There wasn’t a profusion of options for online connections. No Facebook, Twitter, Google+. Mobile phones were for calls and maybe texts. So stepping into an online discussion board was not a fleeting moment, but a chunk of time I used to explore and deepen experiences and connections with others. I invested.

Today, it takes quite a bit of gardening to nurture an online community with deep roots and spreading boughs. It seems we are in an era, though, of rhizomes, instead of simply trees. Networks that spread like the amazing mycorrhizal fungi, the symbiotic association of fungus and roots. From Wikipedia (perhaps a mycorrhizal network itself in some ways)

Mycorrhizal networks (also known as common mycorrhizal networks – CMN) are underground hyphal networks created by mycorrhizal fungi that connect individual plants together and transfer water, carbon, and nutrients. The formation of these networks is context dependent, and can be influenced by soil fertility, resource availability, host or myco-symbiont genotype, disturbance and seasonal variation.[1]

So where do we invest when we are aware that we are operating in an ecosystem? This is now a driving question. Is it more than planting a tree seed that takes time to germinate and mature?

Then Sue Braiden posted the following on Facebook, spawning a wonderful response thread that criss-crossed between technology, sociology and many other juicy things. It hearkened so much to me that I asked for permission to post it on my blog as a guest post which went up earlier today.

An ecomuseum is a participatory approach to culture by definition. And their motto at the Ecomuseum of Santa Cruz is ‘a people will only preserve what they love and they will only love what they know’. The values of participation are encoded into their DNA, they are the very reason why the institution exists and they affect everything about the experience, from the language it uses to the way people experience it – the soul of the organisation.

(Can’t refind on FB… grrr)

EDITED NOTE: The list of links below were intended to inform the subsequent parts of this blog series. Clearly I never got around to drafting those. Clearly the passing of one of my idols/teachers, Pete Seger, crept into my train of thought.

From the Draft Archives: Cultural Strangleholds

I cringe a bit at the title of this post from 2013, having gained a greater appreciation of the role of Jefferson in slavery and White supremacy, but get past the title. (See W.E.B. Du Bois quote at the bottom via the New York Times.) The post from Nirvana Cable is still terrific 9 years later.

Red dirt road winding through the hills of Rwanda with grass and scrub trees from 2013

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“At least Thomas Jefferson wasn’t afraid to write new code” — Transcending Culture — Medium.

It is my experience that the way culture has us in a total stranglehold is that we argue for—and from—our culture. Here in Kenya, I have engaged communities to examine whether or not their culture’s unwritten and largely unexamined social norms are capable of getting citizens where they say they want to go. We’re doing a deep dive into two social norms that we are calling The Culture of Silence (the legacy of oppression) and Wanting Something for Nothing (the legacy of aid).

By inquiring into the consequence of these norms—from the ground rules of inquiry—we are finding communities willing to transcend beliefs that have held them hostage and, once realized, they are free to co-create—negotiate—new social norms. We end up consciously working to create a new story, one that can be owned by everyone involved.

This is painstaking work, and we are finding that talking together to examine whether or not the current cultural norms will get the communities where everyone wants to go is the path. Now, the question is whether or not we will stay on the path when emotions get strong and we want to argue with each other rather than stay in negotiation.

“We must forget,” he writes, “that George Washington was a slave owner, or that Thomas Jefferson had mulatto children … and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring.” The difficulty with this approach, he continues, “is that history loses its value and incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” Black Reconstruction,” “The Propaganda of History,” The Backlash Against C.R.T. Shows That Republicans Are Losing Ground https://nyti.ms/3gjK75f