Derrick de Kerckhove (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)
Table of Contents:
Summary
IntroductionA Problem
A New Connection
A Test-Oriented Approach
A Focused and Accessible Area of Investigation
A Wide Spectrum
Multi-Tasking
Managing the Mental and Physical Energy
The Use of Two Moderators
The Huddles
The Mid-Course Progress Report
The Production Time
The Web Site
Collective Intelligence and the Web
Ideal Futures, the World Brain and Trivium
* * *
Summary
Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto in Canada, reports on his experience at the workshop on Eco-tourism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia earlier this year, where he witnessed an array of individual minds combine to become a single, collective intelligence and tackle the problem of making tourism less destructive to the environment. He analyses the twelve steps that allowed this varied group to become a formidable collective for tackling complex problems. He also highlights the role of websites in evoking and sustaining collective intelligence.
* * *
Introduction
In the workshop on Info-Eco Tourism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology last summer, I witnessed what appears now to have been a formidable process of collective intelligence at work. That is where I really discovered how to tell collective intelligence at work among human beings. The theme of the workshop was `tourism'. I am not interested in tourism at all. I went largely because I was part of the process that was started by Ezio Manzini and John Thackara.
In this workshop, I encountered an extraordinary form of human interaction. I want to describe it to you in twelve little steps. The Melbourne workshop gave me an absolutely articulate vision of collective, human, organic intelligence.
* * *
A Problem
is basically how it all starts. And a sense of the urgency of the problem, which in turn must be made manifest. Ezio Manzini was extremely concerned about sustainable development. Ezio has been thinking consistently about this for years. There was a tremendous drive to develop this question of sustainable economic development in the context of the information environment.
* * *
A New Connection
is the next important thing: the sense of urgency is the motivation and the new connection forms an attraction. It has to be new. That's how the brain works -- it likes to connect. If you propose a complex connection that requires many different routes, you propose a real challenge to individual people and give them something that collectively can be worked out. The connection here was the Info-Eco concept.
* * *
A Focused and Accessible Area of Investigation
is the third thing is to give people. For this workshop, this was tourism. Everybody knows about tourism. Everybody has done it and even those who haven't done it are still affected by it. It represents a large common ground. A new connection on that ground is an interesting challenge.
* * *
A Test-Oriented Approach
is important for designers and people involved in trying to work out solutions. What comes out of most think tanks and so forth are a bunch of charts with felt-tip pen marks all over them. With designers, you can ask for more than that -- an object; something that has a concrete presence. This materialisation of ideas is very important.
* * *
A Wide Spectrum
of people, representing different disciplines, is essential. In other words: experts are great and very necessary, but having non-experts is also extremely valuable. It is nice to have and share people's knowledge, but ignorance is sometimes almost as important as knowledge. Having very different disciplines is another expression of the same thing. In Melbourne, we had a wide spectrum of people, including students, designers, artists, academics and business people. It was a large cross-section.
* * *
Multi-Tasking
means the creation of small groups. We had five small groups of ten people, with overlapping but clearly identified themes, so people would not repeat one another. The range of the calibration of effort with overlapping specialisation and overlapping common research was a very interesting thing.
* * *
Managing the Mental and Physical Energy
in a conference is the most important thing. Energy movement is generated by the individuals in a group and is absorbed and returned. It is very strong; you need to have that support for the excitement of your own brain, which actually makes you work better and faster.
In Melbourne, there was a wonderful day and a half of performances. Issues were pointed up cleverly. You could see how people were being charged up. They were ready to go the next day when they started the workshop.
* * *
The Use of Two Moderators
was a further exploration of collective intelligence and a great innovation in Melbourne, one that was new for me. One whom I call the `shaker' kept people working and progressing; a second, whom I call the `mover'(this could be an expert, guide or some other person) starts with one group and moves from one group to the other. This second moderator collects ideas, but at the same time creates a sense of community among the five groups.
* * *
The Huddles
are where the movers and shakers, organisers and experts who had been invited to talk about the issue of tourism in various contexts, came together and see what each group had done. This happened every morning: for an hour, there was general discussion of what was happening. There was a sense of progression, literally of growth, as well as of the clarity and transparency of some of the problems. There were also moments of difficulty. This was all happening right there in front of us.
* * *
The Mid-Course Progress Report
is also a crucial turning point. People were trying to work out a concrete solution in all of these workshops. The moment when each group gets together with all the other groups is a very intense one. They all begin competing. This is how the brain works. In the growth of the brain, each individual cell has to compete for position with others to make connections, which can atrophy if they don't get to the right spot to connect. There is a competitive element in this kind of intelligence.
* * *
The Production Time
is by definition limited and precious. If people start to take an irrational, cool, theoretical, leisurely approach, you might just as well throw the project out of the window. On the two days of production, you practically couldn't get near the equipment: everybody was at work and there was tremendous energy. On the day of delivery there was this fantastic sense of accomplishment. Five excellent products were presented.
* * *
The Web Site
was the element closest to my understanding of how intelligence works. And the presence of the web sites was so powerful that we still are connecting today and continuing the activity of collective intelligence on these themes together.
* * *
Collective Intelligence and the Web
The workshop in Melbourne was a great experience and I am sure it was a sign of things to come. Now we know that things can be done this way and can innovate and work at it. The only problem is that it is limited to individual local places, to small groups of people.
Though kind of workshop can proliferate through the Web and by connection, it nevertheless remains a very localised type of thing. How could one use the Web to further collective intelligence? How does one create collective intelligence on the Web? We can use the technologies that have revealed collective intelligence, but how do you manage it on the Web?
Clearly, it is an issue of software. Varieties of architecture of Web sites providing various kinds of connections allow one to discern the development of collective intelligence with a clear shape and structure.
* * *
Ideal Futures, the World Brain and Trivium
One example of a Web site that I think is working as a collective intelligence developer is Ideal Futures, the concept of Robin Hanson. Ideal Futures basically uses the model of the market and predictions of market values over a three-to-six-months future. If you study the market, you can bet on the futures. This is a form of investment. Investment is self-organising. Sometimes it works for you and sometimes it doesn't, but you can do the betting. The idea was to allow you to make a prediction, suggestion, theory or hypothesis. The site gives you access to a series of people's ideas, ordered according to a classification or list. Perhaps you want to know whether Bill Clinton will be the next president, or whether a genetic engineering project could be marketed in a certain way. You put it on line on the site. People can then respond.
Another similar example is borrowed from H. G. Wells and is called World Brain. Wells saw the significance of the Internet and the WorldWideWeb at the end of the 1930's. Now the technology exists to realise his remarkable vision. The purpose is to create a situation in which a so-called world brain is the connection -- I suppose H. G. Wells was a bit like Ted Nelson -- of all the thinking processes, as well as their reclassification, of people who want to concentrate on a problem. On this Web page, which is now open, architectures of intelligence and access to the Web are presented, commented on and applied.
In conclusion, I would like to mention Pierre Lévy, a philosopher, writer and practitioner of collective intelligence. He has created a company called Trivium. With Trivium, you can create what are called trees of knowledge. This consists of a list of people of various competencies and of the people who are available in a group. This can be imagined as a work and knowledge space. When you need to create a team -- a just-in-time team -- you can obtain instant access to available people by index research according to competence or location. It is an automatic system which creates either the collection of the knowledge or people you want as participants in a particular undertaking. I think that Pierre Lévy's ideas concerning, among other things, the importance of `objects' or `vectors' as focal points for the formation of intelligence, will certainly have a great deal to contribute to the growth of collective intelligence.