Collaborative Mind

Created on Jan. 15, 2013, 9:48 a.m. by antonkulaga & updated by antonkulaga on May 2, 2013, 4:41 p.m. Hevok on May 2, 2013, 4:41 p.m.

A system is not a simple the sum of its components. Collective intelligence, the intelligence of teams, communities and society as a whole is not a simple sum of intelligences of its members.

People are connected in social graphs, in which they communicate, coordinate and collaborate. They are like neurons in the brain. The smarter this social brain is the better scientific and social results it produces.

Every transaction has its cost, so called transaction cost by reducing this costs we let "neurons" make more connections, transmit more signals, do it faster and with less distortions. Different software systems and Project methodologies may be used for such kinds of improvements. For instance Semantic Web in conjunction with Machine Learning algorithms, Semantic Quering, visualizations, text-mining and autosuggessions may improve how the knowledge is shared and transformed.

Every individual mind is augmented and extended by the means that s/he uses and people s/he shares and improves its ideas with. It is called Extended Mind concept. It means that an intelligence of a person with search, Wikipedia and abilities to communicate and take advice from others is extended and s/he may solve much more complex tasks and create better ideas and decisions than the same person without this means available. We can use knowledge management and Expert systems, that will allow to augment everyones intelligence in a better way. We can also provide artificial Intelligent Agents that may do some work interacting with both people and knowledge (like bots in Wikipedia). We can also tackle not only augmentation part but natural part as well by providing better means of education and training. Good models and practices (i.e. argumentation techniques [http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj138.pdf]) with their support in our software may also come in handy.

People collaborate and share results of their effort not randomly but in accordance to some institutions, formal and informal rules, protocols and mechanisms of controlling how the rules are performed, By improving this rules and protocols we may rewire the social brain and make it work more productively. Reputation currencies that partially replace money and other market institutions, collaborative filtering and other fancy means may be come in handy here.

So, we arrive to a conclusions that software in combination with different organization and knowledge management techniques may greatly improve collective intelligence of teams, communities and society that on its turn will boost science.

Being a Programmer it is easy to arrive at this conclusion but it is hard to make something that really Changes the state of the Art. Different Projects and communities in this field exist, but their results are not too powerful. There are many reasons for that.

One of which is that most of them stew on their own juice, there is no tight collaboration between different communities. We see a lot of Projects in Science, tech and business that try to do something in the field, i.e. Semantic Web Projects, reputation currencies etc. But they do it separately with weak exchange of results.

We want to change the state of the Art. What we need is:

  1. Understanding, what techniques and algorithms are applicable for which cases.

  2. Bricks. Open Source libraries (like NLP, hypegraphs, autosuggessions, logical inference etc.), public APIs and Ontologies that can be easily used in different Projects.

  3. Experiments. We must try different bricks together and see how the work too improve them and their usage.

  4. Real world Projects that heavily use all this stuff. Projects like Denigma, for instance. They are the main purpose and ending result. We have to find such Projects, define how similar they are, let them exchange data where possible, create/use bricks for them, join efforts on the bricks that we have.

  5. Foundation. People and teams of people that Research, create, promote and fund all of this.

  6. Better collaboration inside of foundation teams. A shoemaker without shoes is definitely not the option for us. We do complex things and we must try to become more productive with means we develop as soon as possible to engage more people and to do more.

We create it out of bricks Open Source modules that can be easily mixed together through open APIs.

acceleration_technology depends_on collaborative_mind
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Tags: projects, drafts
Categories: Concept
Children: Collaboration, Crowd Intelligence

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