Framework for Augmenting the Collective Intelligence of the Ecosystem of Commons-based Initiatives

• Article/Presentation: Framework for augmenting the collective intelligence of the ecosystem of commons-based initiatives. George Pór

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Abstracts of paper invited to the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, Hyderabad, January 10-14, 2011, under the theme "Sustaining Commons: Sustaining our Future"

Abstract

"Commons are sustained by “communities working together in self-governing ways in order to protect resources from enclosure or to build new openly-shared resources.” Self-governance needs shared knowledge. The scalability of commons-based production and distribution depend on the capacity of the communities to augment their collective intelligence.

My motivation is 4-fold:

• Present a framework for making visible and augmenting the collective intelligence of commons-based initiatives and social systems.

• Provide for increasing connectivity in and among commons, by identifying and strengthening generative principles and practices in their knowledge ecosystem.

• Increase the appreciation of how important is to evolve collective sensing and meaning-making organs to the growth and evolution of the commons themselves.

• Illuminate the need for a new research agenda on the Commons and Collective Intelligence; seed conversations for convening a research community focusing on it; and identify key questions to guide future research.

The paper will outline a typology of collective intelligence as a conceptual scaffold to pursue those aims, as presented below.

The price of not supporting the emerging forms of collective action with a framework that can serve as shared reference would be an enclosure on the commons’ invisible collective intelligence, by depriving its users from its full benefits."