7.2 Collective Intelligence

With a number of active individuals, collaboration (and competition) may produce what is known as ‘collective intelligence’. This has been largely theoretical for decades, but new communication technologies, especially the Internet (consider the success of Google and Wikipedia), now allow large numbers of people to work together and in effect act more intelligently than they would alone. The relevance to climate change lies in the size and complexity of the problem, something which collective intelligence may help solve by bringing together wide-ranging areas of expertise and non-expert opinion. Current research includes combinations of online interaction, collective idea repositories, computer simulation, and representations of arguments to help large, diverse, dispersed groups come to decisions about challenges relating to the climate system.

7 Networks and effective action: individuals and society

7.3 Networking