Oct 26
Georgetown Professor Mike Nelson on Government Collective Intelligence at the #ELC09 Conference
At the ACT/IAC Executive Leadership Conference (ELC) in Williamsburg, VA today, I got to hear from Mike Nelson, who's a Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Georgetown University. He spoke on a panel within the ELC "Innovation" track, and made what I thought was a great case for government innovating with social networking tools. [You may recall that I've previously written (http://bit.ly/JFlgc) about how social networking is the underlying key to collaboration.] The following is paraphrasing of Prof. Nelson's thoughts.
We are drowning in a sea of information. In the future we will be encountering 50X as much information as we have now, and we're already maxed out. How do we find the right piece of information, quickly, in any given future situation? The solution is, in essence, taking advantage of collective intelligence and using social tools to help share the best information with the people that need it. Working together helps to form a "group brain" that is a different paradigm than how we normally think about individualism and workflow. [My side note: How do we individually incentivize group thought?]
What's the killer app for collective intelligence? This will change in the future, but right now it's basically Facebook and Twitter, which can act as a powerful aggregation and filtering mechanism for finding the right information at the right time. Self-organizing systems of collective intelligence, as evidenced by organizations like IBM, are one part of solving the "collective intelligence problem."
This quick post oversimplifies but hits the main points. It should also put Mike Nelson on your radar if he's not already. Find out more about him here: http://bit.ly/2ROdkW
