Initiatives to harness the power of collective intelligence

October 12, 2006 Friday the thirteenth is a date not often associated with glorious new beginnings but tomorrow sees the launch (webcast live here at 12:55 PM EST on October 13th, 2006) of a significant new institution that might have far reaching consequences for the way human beings go about their business, organise and run their communities and indeed, run the planet. It’s the official start date for the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) which has the ambitious goal of understanding how to harness the power of large numbers of people—connected together through Internet and other technologies —to better solve a range of business, scientific, and societal problems. Though its agenda is broad and grand, one of the announcements tomorrow will be more focussed - an experiment to create a Wikipedia-style book about how to use communities in business. We Are Smarter Than Me is a business community formed by business professionals to research and discuss the impact of social networks on traditional business functions. Everyone is invited to participate in a revolutionary publishing project - a "network book" to be published in 2007. Each contributing member of this beta community will be listed as an author of the book, and each will receive an equal vote on the distribution of book royalties to charity. The We Are Smarter Than Me community is seeking real examples of companies who are trying to harness the power of community. Just think - this could be the start of a whole new way of doing things - contribute if you can.

« Back to Initiatives to harness the power of collective intelligence