Collective Intelligence theory research

"Why has cooperation, not competition, always been the key to the evolution of complexity? MARTIN NOWAK is a Mathematical Biologist, Game Theorist; Professor of Biology and Mathematics, Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University; Author, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed."

[Here's a quit extensive synthesis of "The Penguin and the Leviathan," in my opinion a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in improving and transforming our economic and political institutions. Human motivation is a subject that 'makes me tick'. I really enjoyed reading "The Penguin and the Leviathan", not only because it paints a much nicer picture of "human nature" than the one used by the free marketeers, but also because it gives a glimpse of a future, higher form of society that will be much more based on human cooperation. I think it is important to see that the seeds of this future society are very much present today. ...]

agreed! thanks for this share... the book's on my wishlist.

"The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference.\nIn Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.\nThis is an excellent yext for someone interested in models of the public sphere. While all the authors are proponents of the deliberative model of democracy (as opposed to, for instance, the liberal, interest-based, technocratic, communitarian, or civic-republican) many of them place their arguments in the context of other models. So, the book reads like a symposium of like-minded people, rather than like a rally of true believers.\nAlmost all of the essays are accessible to a generalist, but several really stand out (especially those by Benhabib, Fraser, and Young)."

"Rescher Epistemology an Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge Suny Series in Philosophy"

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?

From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. "The future has no future" is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks. 

"Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Thousands of high school and university students used Classroom Salon (CLS), http://www.classroomsalon.org/, this past academic year to share their ideas about texts, news articles and other reading materials or their critiques of each others' writings. With the support of the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, CLS will be used in an innovative experiment at the University of Baltimore to see if it can help students who are in danger of failing introductory courses or otherwise dropping out of college. "Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have captured the attention of young people in a way that blogs and online discussion forums have not," said Ananda Gunawardena, associate teaching professor in the Computer Science Department, who developed CLS with David S. Kaufer, professor of English. "With Classroom Salon, we've tried to capture the sense of connectedness that makes social media sites so appealing, but within a framework that that allows groups to explore texts deeply. So it's not just social networking for the sake of socializing but enhancing the student experience as readers and writers.""

[The idea is to create a research group centering around understanding the 'object' of emerging peer to peer dynamics, and more particularly the emerging forms of peer production, governance and property, and the associated paradigms of openness, participation, and commons-orientation. ...]

[ Book: Wolfgang Hoeschele. The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability. Gower Publishing, 2010 Contents [hide] * 1 Description * 2 Contents * 3 Excerpts o 3.1 Introduction o 3.2 Oppressive Scarcities (pp. 19-20) o 3.3 Conclusions: Strategies for Change o 3.4 Table 9.1: Coalitions for change o 3.5 Resource Use and Property Rights to Minimize Scarcity + 3.5.1 Contributory resource uses + 3.5.2 Neutral resource uses + 3.5.3 Rivalrous resource uses + 3.5.4 Key References on resource use Description "The "economics of abundance" is based on a critique of our present economic system, which finds value only in scarce commodities - i.e., things which can be sold at a high price because demand exceeds supply. Because this economy depends on demand always outstripping supplies, it also depends on "scarcity-generating institutions" - institutions that either manipulate supply or demand in order to keep us in a constant state of need. An economy of abundance seeks to dismantle or reform these scarcity-generating institutions in such a way as to affirm our freedom to live life as art (self-expression to others), social equity (so that everyone can live life as art), and sustainability (so that all life can thrive into the future). Among other things, this implies a much greater role for various forms of shared property, individual and community-level self-reliance, and participatory decision-making." (http://shareable.net/blog/event-the-economics-of-abundance) ]

"Would you be better off paying for online newspapers like this one? Should you feel guilty about downloading free music? Is the Web's "information-wants-to-free" culture hurting writers, musicians and the rest of the "digital peasants," as Jaron Lanier calls us, now providing unpaid content to be exploited by the "lords of the clouds" like Google? In my Findings column, I discuss Mr. Lanier's new book, "You Are Not A Gadget," a manifesto decrying the Web's effect on individual creativity. (You can see excerpts of his criticism at Edge and at Cato Unbound.) Mr. Lanier mentions this newspaper as one of the victims as well as the promoters of the Web's ideology. "The New York Times," he writes, "promotes so-called open digital politics on a daily basis even though that ideal and the movement behind it are destroying the newspaper and all other newspapers. It seems to be a case of journalistic Stockholm syndrome." Mr. Lanier also faults himself: "

Objective. Sociologists of technology propose that not only a technological artifact, as such, but also patterns of usage should be considered when studying the social implications of technologies. Accordingly, we explore how people's online activities are influenced by users' socioeconomic status and context of use. Methods. We analyze data from the Allensbacher Computer and Technology Analysis (ACTA) 2004 survey with uniquely detailed information about people's Internet uses and context of usage to explore this relationship. Results. Findings suggest that highstatus and low-status individuals cultivate different forms of ''Internet-in-practice.'' High-status users are much more likely to engage in so-called capital-enhancing activities online than are their less privileged counterparts. Conclusion. Results suggest differential payoffs from Internet use depending on a user's socioeconomic background. Digital inequalities might be mitigated by improving people's Internet equipment and digital experience, but they do not account for all the status differential in use.

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community. ... [M]y approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy.

""This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness" - Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society."

We want to understand how people are coordinating through either self-organizing mechanisms or through explicit organizing mechanisms; we want to understand principles by which those things happen in these environments but not in other s.

Crowdsourcing Works... not only in Research Matters but in The Creative Ones... :) Thhe Power of The e@ple.