Contested Collective Intelligence: Resilience, Complexity & Sensemaking

I gave a seminar at PARC last week with Anna De Liddo, hosted by my long time colleague Maarten Sierhuis (formerly NASA Ames, now Manager of the Knowledge, Language & Interaction Area) and Gregorio Convertino (Augmented Social Cognition Area) who organised the CSCW 2010 Collective Intelligence workshop we attended last year. The talk included our joint work with OLnet Fellow Ágnes Sándor (Xerox), and the OLnet Open Education Evidence Hub, which we had just demo’d and discussed with delegates at the Hewlett Foundation Grantees Meeting.

ABSTRACT: To thrive, organizational entities (learning communities; teams of analysts; formal companies) must make sense of a complex, changing environment. Our interest is in how sociotechnical “collective intelligence” infrastructures may augment this capacity. We are seeking conceptual lenses that illuminate this challenge, and draw ideas from resilience thinking, sensemaking, and complexity science. We propose that these motivate the concept of Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI), and give examples of how the Cohere platform is being designed in response to these requirements. This is a social/semantic web annotation and knowledge mapping environment, with tools for monitoring networks of ideas and generating novel analytics. We also report experimental integration with the Xerox Incremental Parser, in order to evaluate human+machine annotation of knowledge-level claims expressed through rhetorical moves in documents.

These demo movies show Cohere as a complement to the slides. More detailed presentations of some of the ideas summarised in this talk are in the following:

De Liddo, A.; Buckingham Shum, S.; Quinto, I.; Bachler, M. and Cannavacciuolo, L. (2011). Discourse-centric learning analytics. In: LAK 2011: 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, 27 Feb – 01 Mar 2011, Banff, Alberta. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/25829

De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2010). Cohere: A prototype for contested collective intelligence. In: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010) – Workshop: Collective Intelligence In Organizations – Toward a Research Agenda, February 6-10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/19554

Buckingham Shum, S. and De Liddo, A. (2010). Collective intelligence for OER sustainability. In: OpenEd2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 Nov 2010, Barcelona, Spain. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/23352

Simon Buckingham Shum, Ágnes Sándor, Anna De Liddo & Michelle Bachler: Integrating Human & Machine Document Annotation for Sensemaking. Seminar, 11th November 2010, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://olnet.org/node/512

2 Responses to “Contested Collective Intelligence: Resilience, Complexity & Sensemaking”

  1. […] in Seattle (first CHI, first trip to US… heady days!). I was at PARC last week giving a talk, and very much enjoyed the chance to catch up with old colleagues Maarten Sierhuis and Victoria […]

  2. […] and ecological resilience thinking, has started to come together in talks such as this, and […]

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