Encouraging Collective Intelligence for the Common Good:
How Do We Integrate the Disparate Pieces?
In the last 10 years the three organizers have chaired several workshops on Collective and Civic Intelligence, e-democracy, Online Deliberation. Most recently the organizers have jointly launched the Collective Intelligence for the Common Good Open Research and Action Community network [1]. This is part of a strategic plan to develop an international network involving researchers from soft and hard sciences, practitioners and grassroots communities all involved in research and practice of collective intelligence for the common and public good.
The Research network has already reached 60 subscribers including professors form Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, Journal editors from Springer and various senior representative of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), organizations (of which Doug Schuler is former chair). The network has already lead to the organization and Chairing of a Workshop on Collective Intelligence for the Common Good hosted in London [2] and the editing of a special issue in the Springer Journal AI & Society (Artificial Intelligence and Society) (in progress).
The C&T2015 workshop in Limerick is a key event into establishing and reinforcing the CI4CG network and linking it more tightly with researchers in the Communities and Technologies field.
Douglas Schuler
has been working with communities and technologies for nearly 30 years. He is co-founder of the Seattle Community Network, a free public access system launched in 1993, and the organizer of nine
Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing
(DIAC) symposia sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He has worked on deliberative systems for many years including e-Liberate, an online system that allows people to conduct distributed meetings using Roberts Rules of Order. Doug is a professor at the Evergreen State College for nearly 20 years. For the past three years he has been convening the Civic Intelligence Research and Action Laboratory where students collaborate to develop and implement their own research and action projects.
Contact Doug at: douglas@publicsphereproject.org
Fiorella De Cindio,
associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Universita di Milano, currently teaches Internet-based Social Interactions and Digital Citizenship and Tecnocivism (with Andrea Trentini). In 1994, she founded the Civic Informatics Laboratory and RCM, the Milan Community Network. Since then her research has focused on online community/networks, their design, implementation and deployment in real-life settings. She supervised the development of openDCN, a software platform for supporting civic participation and deliberation. Since 1998, she chairs the RCM Participatory Foundation. Her activity in the community earned De Cindio the City of Milan's Ambrogino d'Oro award in December 2001.
Contact Fiorella at: Fiorella.decindio@unimi.it
Anna De Liddo
is Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University (Milton Keynes, United Kingdom). Her research focuses on the socio-technical factors influencing the design and uptake of Online Deliberation and Collective Intelligence infrastructures. In the last 10 years Anna chaired 8 Collective Intelligence workshops, events and research initiatives hosted at prominent HCI conference venues such as CSCW (2012)[3] and C&T (2013) [4]. These workshops and initiatives place her at the core of an international research network on Collective Intelligence and Online Deliberation. Between these initiatives worth of mention is also the ODET 2010: Online Deliberation Emerging Tools workshop, co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation [5]. Currently Anna is Principal Investigator of the Catalyst project [6], aimed at developing Collective Applied Intelligence and Analytics for Social Innovation, and the EDV project [7], which aims to produce advanced video replay of the televised UK election debate.
Contact Anna at: anna.deliddo@open.ac.uk
Acknowledgments
The organizers thank the Catalyst (FP7 program - grant agreement #6111188) for the support to the organization of the first events of the Ci4Cg Network.