For me there is a fairly thin line with a community practices and collective intelligence. They kind of go hand in hand. Sort of a cause and effect situation. The Intelligence you gather from your community of practice is basically what this blog is about. I’m trying to not sound like a broken record. Collective intelligence is people coming together to network their knowledge. Sort of like compounding a database for a particular purpose. A lot of what we know in this world is from experience or troubleshooting. Writing books about it nowadays isn’t nearly as effective and coming together, more than likely online, and putting it all together as one. Wikipedia brings a good point up about copyrighting. This sharing is so broad that it would be hard to copyright but people do have opposing views as to whether it should be done for protection. The Wiki site wasn’t as concentrated as I would have wanted it to be, but it did highlight some good points. There are groups that see Collective Intelligence as participation in the theft of ideas or individualism. I can see how that would be seen as a problem but it really isn’t what’s going on. Sure everything is in the same place but no one else is recognizing it as their own. You can’t be negative to greedy when it comes to intelligence. Wouldn’t make sense to be selfish and just be a know it all anyway. The idea is simple but not new. MIT has compared it to the time when we had a hunting and gathering society. Back then you couldn’t read a book or look it up. It was an experience or experiment with a new technique that was shared and made known or popular. Word of mouth was the distributor. In today’s era, we type it out, but all in all the process is shared even today.

Social Text – Collective Intelligence

MIT – Collective Intelligence