The Challenge

Colletive Knowledge vs. Collective Thinking

Published by Esteban Glas on September 1st, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Social Media, long term thinking, philosophical rant

I find it odd how apparently unrelated things can trigger thoughts. For instance, on my commute I have been reading:

El futuro del dinero: Como crear nueva riqueza, trabajo y un mundo mas sensato

The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World

Bernard Lietaer

I borrowed my book from my Brother, Alex, who’s a Friend of a writer who helped in the Latin American version of the book, but I digress.

Amongst other things the book deals with how the communications era has changed the way money, companies and financial institutions work. The author also discusses on how knowledge is different from other commodities, and how it is hard (or impossible) to profit from it, the argument is that what is charged is the distribution of such knowledge, rather than the knowledge itself. If this is true or not shall be food for thought on another post.

While I was reading I had the feeling that, although the book is fairly new, some of the “new” technologies described quickly had become yesterday’s news. The thought lead me to the idea of a collectively sustained on-line book which would have daily updates and editions as events develop.

Sounds like Wikipedia, right? Wrong. Wikipedia is a collective knowledge effort, and a very good one as such. But it only helps in sharing already known facts. The web is filled with similar examples; forums, wikis and discussion groups amongst them. What the Internet is lacking is successful collective thinking initiatives.

This presents its own set of challenges. While wikipedia has received a big deal of heat from its detractors, most people agree on the fact its content is right or accurate most of the time. This is so because a sort of “status-quo” of known facts exists. Most things are proven facts or lack a better (or more widely accepted) answer. If I were to write that the sun revolves around the earth on Wikipedia, that would be quickly edited and corrected. There is no such status-quo on thinking.

Thus, achieving agreements between those involved in a collective thinking project should be the most challenging stumbling block to cope with. Sure enough, participation could be restricted to those having similar ideas, yet that would go in detriment of diversity, and who wants to have a collective effort without the richness opposing concepts bring to them. The best solution then is to have a clear archive, editing and commenting set of tools that allow contrasting ideas to live together on the same text. Then it would be up to the reader or future collaborators if they want to follow or argument a particular line of thought.

This on itself represents one of the most interesting potentialities of collective thinking: triggering. Theoretically a short text on any subject could give birth to a thousand different lines of thought on a wide variety of different subjects. Picture it as a tree whose branches divide and grow to infinity. Of course this could only be desirable under certain circumstances (I can imagine a Philosophy forum / wiki taking advantage of such approach).

Yet it might bee too much if the objective is different and more concrete. Some amount of moderation and intervention to guide collaborators in the right direction would achieve focus. To further use the tree analogy: imagine moderators as people creating a Bonsai, they can trim some things to keep overgrowth from happening, yet the tree grows on its own unique way.

Maybe you can collectively think with me and help to idealize a good way to give such approaches a life of their own.

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