LIFT07: Lee Bryant and collective intelligence

Running notes from the LIFT07 conference in Geneva.

Lee Bryant of social software consultancy Headshift in London speaks about "collective intelligence for the entreprise". The problem: we are wasting a substantial amount of brainpower of people working in organizations. IT systems don't understand how we work, they offer an insufficient diversity of inputs to stimulate intuitive decision-making. Social tools may represent an answer: tools that get better and more useful as more people use them. The components of enterprise 2.0: social tools, ecosystems of data (RSS etc), connected infrastructure, subscription and aggregation, and participatory culture. He contends (somehow against the idea of the Internet as a "global brain") that there is no global collective intelligence. Collective intelligence can only exist within defined communities (mentions Digg, Slashdot, Wikipedia) which reflect native culture and norms. Actionable CI exists within more tightly bounded communities and networks. He says that organizations (companies) with at least 1000 people have just enough scale to support their own productive version of these systems (that sounds like a too low number however, since generally only a tiny fraction - 1% - of people in a network are actual producers and sharers, others are mostly "readers"). Obviously collective intelligence is not only a tech issue, it's a cultural issue too (Clay Shirky's "situated software"), needs to be contextualized within a company, mapped against existing practices.