Interview with Mark Tovey on Collective intelligence, democracy, and global problems

Well, Dave, it's my pleasure. I'm fascinated by the process you've set up here, and I hope to get to as many questions as I can.

Grin. Ah, Jeremy, what an interesting question! :)

I am skeptical about the cognitive capacities of individuals to deal with the complexities of governing the planet.

This is not a new skepticism. Lévy raises it in his seminal 1994 text, "Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace."

So, while I'm not sure it's possible for an individual to take over the world in any kind of effective sense, perhaps it might be possible to nudge the world in the direction of taking over itself. As a civilization, we're clearly not in control of where the car is going.

We, as human beings, have yet to take over the world in any important sense, in any sense where we can be said to exert meaningful control over our own actions, or over the biosphere. Our actions are causing a lot of changes, to be sure, but they aren't directed. We have no capacity (ala Stamos), to choose a direction we like, to find consensus, or even exert minimal checks and balances over our activities.

There are no institutional levers on the controlled development of dangerous technologies, or over various kinds of resource depletion, pollution, or externalization of various costs. We have the veneer of a society that is effectively governing itself, but in reality that society has large informational blind spots, and societal biases, which prevent any kind of meaningful, coordinated action.

So, as a cognitive scientist, I would focus in on those blind spots and biases. These are amenable to large-scale cognitive engineering. That's a huge point of leverage.

Although the phenomenon predates the internet by a couple of thousand years (you could regard the development of The Illiad and The Odyssey, over centuries, as an example of collective intelligence), we're seeing a lot of interesting examples of collective intelligence emerging on the internet at the moment, which is one of the reasons that people are starting to sense the power of this idea.

The Wikipedia project is probably the best known example. You could regard the scientific enterprise as a whole, especially peer-review, as a remarkably successful, and institutionalized, example of collective intelligence. Or the creation, in the 19th and 20th centuries, of the Oxford English Dictionary, based on reader-submitted illustrative quotations.

The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence likes to define it this way: "collective intelligence is groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent." This hearkens back, I think, to the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, and Marvin Minsky's definition of AI: "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by people."

Most of the authors in this book emphasize a particular strength of numbers. They say that given the right conditions (and this is crucial!), many minds, coordinated in some fashion, can produce better results, or faster results, or more effective results, than many individuals working in isolation.

It came together in a remarkably short period of time. I've been working on it since November 2007, pretty much 24/7, and it was just published last month. It occupied my life completely for a time. A great deal of work, but also a wonderful space to be in!

The publisher at EIN Press, Robert Steele, was planning a conference, which instead turned into a book, and, now a series of books.

Tom Atlee (who wrote the definitive text on deliberative democratic methods, The Tao of Democracy), and George Pór (who, among other things, writes the blog of collective intelligence) helped enormously by inviting some terrific people to participate. I was invited to edit the volume. I asked a bunch of other people to contribute, and the ball kept rolling.

I tried to order it in such a way that it reads well from beginning to end. The ideas on small groups laid out in the beginning should help to inform the mass collaborative research at the end.

In keeping with the spirit of the volume, all of the papers were made freely available online during the editing process, so that the authors (and the public) could watch the book as it unfolded.

The book is also has a non-commercial-attribution license under Creative Commons 3.0, which means that translations, audiobooks, and other creative applications are now possible. I'm now working with George Pór on an interactive version of the book, partly modeled on the target article system from Brain and Behavioral Science.

The first step, as I see it, is to find a way to bring together the masses of information on addressing global problems that are currently scattered throughout the globe. Some of this information is in encyclopedias, some in government databases, some on various places on the internet. Finding a way of bringing that information together in a meaningful way is to my mind, the first step. I've got some ideas about how that might be done. This is one of my current research pre-occupations.

The second step is to figure out how to make that information available to policy-makers in an unbiased, credible, and effective way, such that it can help to inform policy decisions.

Ooo - I really don't want to play favorites. I'll resist your question and instead say that one of my favorite things about the book is that there are so many chapters, and that they are all so short and relatively accessible. As a result, it really is a book that can be read by anyone—as well as mined by academics, internet activists, and policy-makers.

Maybe I'll say this—the book has a terrific index, really first rate. This was the publisher's idea—he insisted on this, and was instrumental in making it so thorough and well-organized. The index was produced collaboratively, with the participation of many authors (of course), and some timely help from Hassan Masum and Marc Stamos. It really does enhance its value as a reference work.

Worldchanging Canada is a group blog. A group blog is where a number of writers contribute to a blog, but where the blog focussed on a single topic. In this case, we write about solutions: tools, technology, and models which are already changing the world. If we want to get to that bright green future we all want, we need to know how to get there: what already works, and that can be replicated today. We aim to provide context, and we aim to provide depth.

Worldchanging.ca been around for a year and a half, and we have a little over a dozen bloggers -- all Canadians, although occasionally reporting in from pretty remote parts of the world. Rod Edwards is now in Bangladesh, for instance!

WC Canada is also the first country-level version of the famous Worldchanging.com blog, which was founded by Jamais Cascio and Alex Steffen, and is still edited by Alex Steffen. Worldchanging.com has an estimated half million readers worldwide. Worldchanging, generally, is all about attentional philanthropy—bringing a spotlight of attention on solutions that ought to be better known.

Worldchanging.com has been around for about five years and have a rich database of thousands of solutions. Many of these solutions were compiled into a book from Abrams, which just came out in paperback. It aggregates many, many solutions between two covers.

Both the blog, and the book, are a great example of collective intelligence in the service of sustainable solutions. It is a particularly potent advertisement for the value of aggregating existing solutions.

Well, there were actually a number of books before this one, all in this space of so-called public intelligence—intelligence of various kinds used for the public good. The last volume was called Peacekeeping Intelligence. The next book in the series will be called Peace Intelligence, and I believe this will be followed by a volume on Commercial Intelligence, both due out in 2008. Each of these volumes will have a different editor. And there will be three more in 2009.

To a certain extent. An exciting example of this I saw recently was the use of USB keychain democracy. There was quite a bit of buzz about this at Berkman@10. In societies which are relatively closed, internet can give way to sneaker net, in the form of passing information from one USB keychain to another, often by use of an intermediate device much smaller than a laptop. The fact that the media and devices are so tiny means that information can be exchanged in public places, like the back of a cab or a public park. This offers many possibilities for openness.

Ah, good question. There is a great deal of room greater transparency in governments, some of which could be so easily enabled. The Sunlight Foundation is obviously doing great work here, with their mashups of earmarks and Google Maps, for instance, which allow you to easily see where, geographically earmarks are being allocated. You don't know which representative was responsible, but it helps the public to make some shrewd guesses.

Tim O'Reilly's column on Why Congress Needs a content management system is also instructive here. At the moment, no-one knows who adds what to bills. To programmers, and people who work with wikis, this is very odd, because every edit can be easily tracked. How can this be, some might say—"why don't they just check the commits?" So we've got this very interesting situation where new technology may modernize some of the older creakier parts of the democratic system.

Another place to watch are Jim Rough's ideas on Citizen Deliberative Councils, also known as Citizen's Assemblies or Wisdom Councils, which you can read about in his chapter. We've seen some very interesting examples of these up here in Canada. They're organized along the lines of juries—people are selected randomly, and in a way that they can be demographically representative. Democracy theorists called demographic representation descriptive democracy. These groups of people are then given lectures by experts on whatever they are supposed to deliberate on in as unbiased a way as possible. What has been found is that these can be remarkably successful in producing workable solutions for wide cross-sections of people. Even when their decisions are non-binding, the produce policy ideas which are nuanced, and useful for garnering political will. Tom Atlee has written some great stuff on these.

Jason Diceman is doing some really interesting work on small scale deliberative democracies with his Dotmocracy project. Thomas Homer-Dixon has done some interesting theorizing on the importance of winnowing policy suggestions from the public in a way that is both useful and will be perceived as fair.

I do anticipate opposition to what you are calling a free-information society. We're certainly seeing it in the copyright debates up here in Canada right now. I think that one of the remarkable stories in this space is the tremendous inroads that initiatives like free culture and the Creative Commons (as well as the open source movement) have been making, and the degree of cultural acceptance that they have been gaining. It's very interesting, in fact, that those movements have not encountered more opposition than they have.

I should probably make clear that many people in this space do not take the hard Stallmannian line that all information should be free. There are clear benefits to intellectual property in producing innovation, just as there are clear benefits to the provisions of the Creative Commons that the right to retain credit, or attribution for one's work, can be reserved. The question is where to strike the balance.

A very interesting question has to do with whether there is any reason to keep socially useful information, which has no clear competitive or strategic advantage, in closed information silos.

Look at Brian Eddy's work, for instance, which traces where our sustainability indicators come from. Most of the indices of sustainability that we see in the newspaper are not the original data points. Most trace their lineage back to large information silos—at the UN, NGO's, and government departments. Eddy's project allow you to discover exactly which silos are open and which are closed. His project is to get the closed silos to open up.

This kind of emphasis on socially useful information engages the public intelligence movement generally. There has been some very interesting work done, some of it documented in this book in Steele's chapter on the Smart Nation, in inviting intelligence services to be much more open with the information they collect. These would seem to be the ultimate closed shop when it comes to information, and yet there are real successes that can be reported there.

I see this as a process of being able to identify, in a deliberative way, the nuanced positions of each party so that common ground, or at least common cause, can be found. Mike Pilling's Open Policy initiative (openpolicy.ca) is a great example of this. It attempts to map the entire space of Canadian political discourse, in a way where everyone's opinion is represented. The key rule (analogous to NPOV) is that you can't modify any position in the wiki unless you make it stronger. That's crucial. That way you can interrogate the strong positions, rather than a bunch of straw positions. It also eliminates a great deal of controversy. The decisions on fairness are made by people voted by the community to be the fairest arbitrators. It's an interesting system.

For success in finding common cause, I'd look to the Save The Internet folks for examples. They've been very successful in this area.

The key question, as I see it, is how do you close the Ingenuity Gap? This is the gap that Thomas Homer-Dixon identified between the magnitude of the problems that face us currently, and what we know how to do about them. Since CI is seen to accelerate progress in other areas, how can it be used to accelerate progress in solving global problems?

Not yet! :) But perhaps you, or someone else, could work with folks like Librivox to start one!

Thanks very much for having me. I've enjoyed this. Hopefully we can do it again sometime!