Society 2.0

2gather08 was a remarkable, high-energy unconference in London, July 2-3, 2008, "a festival of ideas, popular technologies and progress."

Inspired by meetings I had the week before at the Shambhala Insitute of Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia, about the Collective Intelligence Convergence website in Montreal, and the "Café U" action research in Boston, I decided to sum up my current thinking on the issues that I started exploring in Spiraling up.

The result was the "Society 2.0: designing an action research into the next civilization" talk I gave at 2gether08. The slides are attached. Your comments and questions, as always, are more than welcome!

Here are some earlier steps that led me to "Society 2.0:"

My work on macro-scale issues and experiments started in 1986, when I co-designed Transpacnet that was a pioneering, multi-media desktop teleconference event sponsored by Apple. It was an early attempt to create a model for meaningful, large-scale group communication in a global information space, described in "Social Presencing Theater for scaling up collective intelligence."

After a couple of smaller pilots, the next large-scale event was the Knowledge Ecology Fair in 1998. It was the first virtual gathering dedicated to knowledge ecology, the people-centered version of knowledge management, where emphasis is on the relationship and synergy between people and their communities of practice, in the process of collaborative knowledge development. It was attended by 400 participants from around the world.

Next, I presented a paper on "Designing for the Emergence of a Global-scale Collective Intelligence" at the First Global Brain Workshop (2001). It introduced a framework for a large-scale research collaboration to explore the potential of globally distributed intelligence for solving world problems and closing the gap between the human condition and human potential. That paper can be downloaded from the Community Intelligence Resource Garden.

Finally, a major influence on my thinking reflected in the "Sociery 2.0" talk was the Lifecycle of Emergence: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovations to Scale by Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, 2006.