Hasta La Ideas

Participants of Continuum’s workshop

We are a collaborative species. No single perspective could possibly cover every aspect of an issue, but together through the collage of our collective experience we wage war on the challenges of our reality. This is collective intelligence, an emergent characteristic of life that we see in many other social species like honeybees, ants, and migratory birds. At every level of complexity an individual’s best efforts could never compare to the magnitude of the seemingly intelligent behavior of the swarm.

On October 8th, 2009, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, hosted an international cast of social scientists, information systems engineers, venture capitalists, innovation consultants and designers for the first-ever Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) Conference. The substance of the conference centered around measuring and visualizing the emergent patterns of communication within social networks, identifying and tracking trends as they ripple throughout a social system, then pulling out the social and anthropological meaning of what we observe, allowing us to better understand and perhaps even forecast human behavior. This creates a unique opportunity to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of collaboration, and to find the trendsetters, thought leaders, and gate keepers within any given network. “Bleeding edge” doesn’t quite do this stuff justice; this is the blade that precedes the bleeding edge.

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