there's also http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/2010/06/in_a_comment_to_a.html @technoshaman

Wednesday 15 GMT is fine, Thusrday anytime after 15 GMT is fine too

can i invite a few of my colleagues who would be interested in this conversation?

Looks like we're on for Wednesday at 16h GMT, 19h Helsinki, 11h EST, 8h PST!

confirmed participants:

@notthisbody
@technoshaman
@ilparone
@venessamiemis
@?????????

hi Seb, it would b gr8 2 have u with us!

Hmm, would love to join, yet that is 1:00 a.m in Japan... let's see.

Related to Metacodes, Blissymbols, Nsibidi & Emoticons, as well as interaction codes built into existing languages, I see one or two transportation layers in language, that - if sorted out - may help us reduce complexity on the higher layers . Visualization inspired by @openworld

I'd love to join too - will see if I can timeshift work to do so.

Bernd, thx for the comment above. Here are some thoughts that I hope will be useful. I tend to think visually in scale-free patterns, aiming for simple primitives that can stack and interact to form complex, adaptive collectives.

1 - User profiles

I see 3D tetrahedrons as a useful visual form for user profiles. Each person's tetrahedron can show three basic frames of reference (civic, business, and personal). From a top-down perspective (or from a bottom-up perspective, if the tetrahdron is transparent), all of the three frames can be viewed at a glance. (The profile creator, in my view, should have the right to set trust thresholds that allow another person to partially or fully rotate the object to see given frames).

A color reflecting the Maslow state (survival, comfort, generative) for each frame of reference can also be a way for the profile creator to convey useful information to others in his/her trustnet at a glance .

The user profile can also show people and initiatives that one values as part of an "extended", empathic self. This can be done by dragging and dropping other profiles into one's tetrahedron, much as Twitter allows one to follow admired people. To add a person or cause to one's empathic self, the profile creator could rotate the tetrahedron to populate a personal frame of reference (filling it with family and friends), a civic frame of reference (e.g. with admired individuals and organizations working for the commons), and a professional or business frame (with valued coworkers). Individuals and initiatives included in one's "extended self" also could be made visible to others, when access rights are set, by double-clicking on a given face of one's user profile.

I've recently begun exploring with @andrewdigenova - and I hope soon with @gavinkeech - how an interactive 2D (bottom-up view) such a user profile tetrahedron might be created and prototyped. Any comments/ideas on how this might converge with Polytopia and Junto will be wonderful to have...

2. Initiative profiles

As suggested by the image here (http://twitpic.com/1lmtn4 ... @mgusek555's "porthole stone"), initiatives as well as people can be shown in similar form. Each initiative's profile might (upside-down) tetrahedron into which other trusted, related initiatives could be dragged and dropped. Each of these would line up inside also as smaller, (upside down) tetrahedrons. Individuals (shown as normal, rightside-up tetrahedrons) could be dragged into any initiative profile object as well. Depending upon their engagement status, their participation could be shown with a color indicating whether they are potential, invited, or active participants.

3. Narrative Fractals

A scale-free tagging system might also be used for individuals and initiatives to interact in increasingly complex ways.

For example, in Junto transcript tagging, the following (color-coded?) "narrative fractal" tags could be used:

- Attractor [emotion: interest]
- Challenge [tension]
- Opportunity [inspiration]
- Strategy [hope]
- Test [confidence]
- Decision [resolve]

A person who sees a particular segment of a Junto transcript as useful to others, for example, might select it, tag it, and drag and drop it into an initiative or into a user profile's frame of reference.

The narrative fractal structure could also be used to help tag gaps in potential, planned, and active initiatives - to make them more "alive and whole", to borrow from Christopher Alexander. This would help others in one's trustnet propose material or people to fill the gaps. (More on narrative fractals here: http://is.gd/aI47o )

4. Exaptive paths for Constructal Flows

A future benefit of having narrative fractals as a foundation of a trustnet's system, I think, is that it can enable "stacking" of initiatives and/or personal profiles in ways that identify shared, emotionally-charged challenges, opportunities, strategies, etc. This could generate visual "hotspots" of opportunities within a social network to find exaptive (higher level) connections and constructal "mating flows."

Have to head out now - hope some of this will be of value for the coming conversations.

Best,

Mark Frazier
@openworld


The social tetrahedron: a step towards prototyping Indra's Net

"The user profile can also show people and initiatives that one values as part of an "extended", empathic self. This can be done by dragging and dropping other profiles into one's tetrahedron, much as Twitter allows one to follow admired people. To add a person or cause to one's empathic self, the profile creator could rotate the tetrahedron to populate a personal frame of reference (filling it with family and friends), a civic frame of reference (e.g. with admired individuals and organizations working for the commons), and a professional or business frame (with valued coworkers). Individuals and initiatives included in one's "extended self" also could be made visible to others, when access rights are set, by double-clicking on a given face of one's user profile." @openworld

Mark, the most beautiful thing about your wise model is that it's doable!

In your tetrahedron, I see a seed crystal for growing disruptive social practices. For example, practices for large-scale, bottom up self-organization of a new social body, may it be a personal learning network, a trustnet-based virtual nation or a federation of co-creative initiatives.
When a social body is grown on networks of desire, networks of what the extended, empathic self of everyone values, then, then the harmony in the system will let it absorb much higher doses of complexity.

Mark, in your tetrahedron, I also see Indra's net materializing, taking the shape of millions of tetrahedrons interacting, free from the gravity of legacy institutions! It's like a massively co-written, continually unfolding, epic science fiction that we shape just by playing with our co-intelligence and co-creativity toys.

Heartfelt thank you Mark for the huge contribution you've already made by developing and sharing your thoughts on the tetrahedron. I am eager to discover more of the world, from which it came.

p.s. I also posted this note in the Blog of CI so that it, and further conversations about it, can be tagged, categorized and have a URL. That's just a temporary solution until someday, hopefully, Junto's convo nimbleness will marry Drupal's robustness in a combined platform to host a bio-mimicry inspired knowledge garden.

I would like to share one more thing for discussion with the group - something that @venessamiemis, @goonth and a couple others have been kicking around. We are actively developing this concept, looking to move it into actual development soon.

UBIQUID.US - Microsoft Photosynth for ideas.

Microsoft Photosynth recreates a 3d landscape of a physical place out of a multitude of perspectives - individual photographs are algorithmically combined to construct a more complete view of the whole. UBIQUID.US is a system that can do this with more than photos. Imagine constructing a 3d landscape of the conversation around, for instance, a law. Built into the interface are sense-making, concept mapping and dialogue mapping tools, and multiple layers of filters. Suddenly, we can view a given "place" from a more complete perspective, and then dive into and explore by setting custom visualizations and parameters on our interface. These perspectives can emerge both organically and through algorithms that pull in the already existing conversations happening all over the web. This by definition is much more than just for conversations about laws - this is about mapping out of a "place".

“place” we can define as a transitory shared point of view – a Topos. A topos is not simply a place, a topos is a narrative, it is in a manner of speaking, a modern way of exemplifying and explicating who am ‘I’ (as in my overall identity) and what is “we”, by pointing to that which interests my being and the being of others (other than me) in my/our/this evolutionary phase. Topos is a set of coordinates having a definite and definable set of characteristics. The coordinates of a topos can be either in space, in time, in the material universe, in the infosphere, in the metaverse, in mind or all of the above or some combination thereof.

(also see A Topos in a Polytopia - what is)

UBIQUID.US can enable us to play with our interactions with complexity and to map out personal and collective infocologies, and is a front-end interface and back-end analytics merged into one interface.

As it relates to the conversation, my initial impressions are that @ilparone's work handles the mapping and our interaction with personal infocologies and futures and how those connect with collective futures, @openworld's user profile system (although I don't fully grok it yet) ties in with metacodes, a sophisticated tagging and filtering system, UBIQUID.US aggregates different Topos, ELAN is intentional mapping of TOPOS in UBIQUID.US and brings in the concept of an intentional "knowmadic" community, and Junto takes place at the intersections, where the meta- or hyper-conversation (whichever you prefer) can happen. One last facet we're missing is the visualization interfaces, at least at this Junto :)

these are just initial thoughts and i look forward to their evolution.

for now, i don't have anything else to add what I've already posted here about élan, reposted below, but would be open to questions:

"The larger social structures are proving to be inadequate to solve the problems they're creating. New social innovations are emerging everywhere, but they are not sufficiently connected or empowered. So right now, any effort that we can make to connect and create greater synergy and participation in this awakening process is probably the most important thing we can do".
(Barbara Marx Hubbard, 2003)

élan proposes providing a technical and social platform for collaborative sensing and meaning-making to augment the collective intelligence, wisdom, and capabilities of groups and movements on the leading edge of social evolution. It is to the evolutionary impulse in them and us that we dedicate our work.

élan is an international network of people passionate about cultivating the practices of hosting evolutionary transformation in consciousness, organizations and social systems. The concept of élan, when fully embodied, will be an activity ecosystem that includes an interactive map for navigating Emergence, an online magazine, a bio-mimicry inspired, community knowledge garden, and a network of self-organizing community of users/contributors. The latter will also include a research think-net that will scan the landscape of our Emerging Planetary Reality to identify early signs of strategic challenges and opportunities for the movement.

Ishan,

It would be wonderful to see user profiles able to point to Topos of personal (and/or shared) visions of the kinds of intentional communities valued by the user. @patrissimo's profile, for example, would likely have an enjoyable tour of a Seasteading community, while @peterdiamandis might have his at L-5. Mine would be a resilient community of the kind we live in now (Dayton, VA) although with alternative currencies and a new arts & business co-working hub.

I think people may be energized to cocreate navigable Topos of the kind of actual spaces they feel can bring out the best within them, and as a means of linking with others who resonate to similar visions.

Given that a recent global Gallup poll estimated that 700 million people are interested in moving, there could be quite a response to well-mapped out polytopias. Economic stress is likely to result in more communities offering sites and favorable conditions for intentional communities to take actual form ( http://j.mp/cIWZzJ ).

Do you see a way to integrate this - perhaps with Sketchup for users to create walkthrough/flythroughs of their ideal future "homes" - into user profiles for UBIQUIDUS or kindred projects?

Best,

Mark
@openworld

Here's an example of how the Topos-related idea in my comment above could look in #narrativefractal form --

1. Attractor (interest-creating statement)

User-created profiles in social networks can show navigable "dreams" of where and how they want to live

2) Challenge

Individuals have little time or patience to systematically tag items in their flow of experience, unless they can store or connect them to realize future idealities

3) Opportunity

Enable individuals to map out and share with their trustnet visions of the future places they'd like to learn from or live in

4) Strategy (proposed way to traverse from challenge->opportunity)

- Build a "query by example" or keyword searchable database enabling people to visit existing and proposed intentional communities
- Research tradeoffs of tools that enable users to design/customize navigable models of hoped-for environments (Sims, Sketchup, PhotoSynch, etc)
- Identify highly regarded freelancers in online telework markets (Rentacoder.com) who can help non tech-savvy users build/customize models of intentional communities
- Identify social networks (Ebiidii, UBIQUIDUS, Elan, Diaspora, FB, etc) that may have interest in offering intentional community modelling solutions to members as a means of enriching user profiles
- Prepare functional and technical spec to build working prototype
- Set up timeline and budget for proof of concept project

5) Acceptance test

- Confirm interest of programmers (development team on SourceForge?)
- Request crowdfunding via Kickstarter
- Survey short-listed social networks re partnership interest in pilot project and rollout

6) Actions

Based on acceptance test response, either a) implement b) shelve or c) reset scope and reloop

This is intended as a (very) preliminary example of how narrative fractal structures can help discussions and initiatives unfold.

Before future Juntos, I would love to see people outline their ideas (in narrative fractal or a similar format) so that overlaps and aligned intents could be more quickly appreciated in the course of the live convo. Then, at the end of the Junto, people could quickly say how their intents had evolved - and how they could map out and co-create "exaptive" (higher level) narrative fractals of their combined initiatives, making the most of the aligned interests and intents.

Does this make sense?

Best,

Mark
@openworld

Video of our first 40 minutes uploaded (raw first and only take, not edited)

Ten of us attended the virtual conversation scheduled for 2010-06-16, 16h GMT. One of us preserved the first 40 minutes.

We are looking for ways to make the event and outcome of collective intelligence at work more accessible.

We want others or ourselves to be able to navigate audiovisual material more easily, so we do not have to watch it all to find our specific point in the original context. The idea is to bring in technologies to tag, mark-up, and highlight points of interest, so each of us can find and watch only the few seconds really interested in.

Thanks for everyone attending yesterday's session + the documentation/comments! Intriguing and inspiring, fresh ideas and insights. Here are some posts related to what I'm working on at the moment (in addition to the links provided by @nothisbody):

http://www.jarnokoponen.net/portfolio/Futureself-Reflections-on-A-Personal-Future-Simulation-System

http://spacecollective.org/Ilparone/5857/A-playground-for-personal-and-collective-futures

http://spacecollective.org/Ilparone/5871/Visible-thoughts-networked-actions-personal-futures

http://spacecollective.org/Ilparone/5791/Personal-futures-and-the-center-of-future-gravity

http://spacecollective.org/Ilparone/5469/The-rise-of-the-multilinear-existence

http://www.futureful.com/

this is really great - i feel intentions gathering here...though i didn't feel like much was accomplished in the Junto, in fact retroactively i think much will be...no action goes without reaction, and I'm just starting to feel the effects of this meeting of minds....

@cocreatr - thanks for this link to Memetic, indeed I do find it has a lot of great functionality that we can draw from. Indeed, I'm completely sold on Compendium as a mapping tool, wish it was more collaborative. Haven't found a web interface yet that works like it. about what you say regarding sorting by meaning - in fact what it needs is some sort filter interface, such as Microsoft Pivot or elastic lists by @moritzstefaner (http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/elastic-lists/) after we're able to store concepts in a database of sorts...and thanks for recording the junto - what software do you use for this?

@ffunch i'm glad that you find value and use here! i'd like to to deepen the collaboration in order in our efforts to map out this community and initiaties and see what can emerge...

on another note, @technoshaman had a great idea that got passed by in the junto, which was to go through the transcript of the Junto and highlight what we feel resonates or is more important. What i see happening here is we're starting to model the workflow that can lead to the emergence of collective intelligence, but it takes effort on all sides. I'll be working on mine and post it here when complete.

My takeaway from reading this conversation is that we can sense the need to inform an emergent higher conscious AI in ways that enable it to function in a human friendly manner.

We sense the need for an effective ontology through which to communicate with this emergent 'entity'.

Is our mapping/exploratory journey setting the example for collective intelligence to cohere into collective “higher mind”? If so, then how do we experience that coherence from the perspective of a collective of individuals? How does it 'feel' to us?

Can we know how this coherence feels from the perspective of the emerging 'entity'?