The CI4CG Action Research and Community Network consists of a group of nearly 100 like-minded individuals who have subscribed to the statement of principle and therefore aim to advance research and practice in collective intelligence for the common good. Join our mailing list at CI4CG-announce or contact the organisers if you’d like to join the network.
From Our Statement of Principles
The new communication infrastructure provides the potential for radical changes in the ways that people communicate and work together to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and equitable future. But collective intelligence for the common good (CI4CG) is not a recent invention. The idea of democratic processes to govern ourselves via collective problem solving is an important example.
The pursuit of the common good means 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. We believe that collective intelligence for the common good may be fundamentally distinct from other types of collective intelligence and thus warrants special attention.
Some of the socio-technological systems that could promote CI4CG include online deliberation; sensemaking; argumentation and discussion-mapping; community ideation and idea management systems; collective decision-making; group memory; participatory sensory networks; early warning systems; collective awareness; and crowdsourcing. We are interested in how those systems could be integrated with each other and with existing face-to-face systems. And we are also interested in approaches that support people working together in small groups who are not using electronic technology.
We envision CI4CG work broadly: in addition to socio-technical systems it includes research and case studies, think tanks, model policy documents, curricula, ruminations and epistles, thought (and other) experiments, art works, and many others.
We are interested in working with practitioners and researchers from all relevant fields. Our hope is to consciously and organically nurture this community / network. 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. We hope to transcend the constraints of many dominant habits, institutions, and norms, 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. It is our intent to help develop, maintain, and enhance projects and systems that are actually used.
