Collective Intelligence and Active Citizenship | 1 PHD 101 quotes

I have launched the 1PHD 101quotes campaign.

I am looking for theoretical support with references and quotes to 101 statements I have made in the initial description of my thesis project.

I have divided them by topic.
Today I share the one I have associated with:
Collective Intelligence and Active Citizenship

You can leave a comment here on the blog with the references or directly on the working document. (I have to say that so far, most of the contributions are occurring in the Spanish document).

#18
With the advent of what has been called web 2.0, the concept of Collective Intelligence has become popular.

#19
We can understand Collective Intelligence as the capacity of a community to generate a thought, a solution, which is not the simple sum of each person’s contribution, but is the result of interaction, debate and collaborative work that develops between all of us. Nor is it simply the choice of a hypothesis, or a solution proposed by one person and which gets the support of a majority within a group or a community. It is really the construction of everyone’s work; the construction of something to which everyone has contributed.

#20
So if people can quickly exchange information by influencing each other, they generate knowledge and thinking that is precisely the result of a collective intelligence. It is not simply a process of influence, but we register a process in which a person’s knowledge advances by being constantly in dialogue with the opinions and thoughts of others.

#21
Today we see how our access to the digital sphere is not only about connecting knowledge or people who are far apart from each other. It also has to do with the connection between people and knowledge that may be physically very close.

#22
So when these relationships between agents, people and knowledge are related to a territory in which we are all situated, this collective intelligence has another character and another potential because it can have a direct impact on the territory.

#23
There are communities that in principle have developed mainly digitally, and over time they have seen very clearly how having a physical meeting point allows them to achieve other types of results and generate other types of knowledge, other types of relationships and then new opportunities. One example is the case of Hackerspaces or more recently Makers spaces.

#24
Hackerspaces: we are talking about spaces where people who are passionate about new technologies and digital innovation, who are used to sharing and discussing the results of their experiments, directly from their own homes, are added. Little by little, they have begun to generate hacker spaces. Spaces in which people, although they brought their own computers and continued to work with their computers, actually did so all in the same space, and this enormously multiplies their capacity to influence each other because, undoubtedly, physical contact, physical proximity, allows and increases this capacity for exchange.

#25
The same is happening now with the Makerspaces. All those people who are messing around with new technologies to generate objects and to generate this new wave that some call the maker movement or new craftsmanship. Rather than each doing it in their own home, the usefulness of doing it all together in one space amplifies the opportunities and the ability to learn collectively. Undoubtedly this has been made possible by the digital, however the moment we can visualise it in space it has a new scope.

#26
Social movements that started thanks to a series of events and dynamics that have had as an articulating and empowering element, the communication developed in the digital sphere.

#27
One of them is undoubtedly the one that started in Spain in 2011 and was called 15M: a widely documented movement that was characterized by its enormous inclusiveness that allowed the participation of people of all ages, from all social backgrounds, who without the need for any flag or organization that grouped them, simply recognized the urgent need to transform society, and face a heavy situation of social injustice widely exacerbated by the economic crisis that was experiencing at that time in many Western countries.

#28
Examples of movements in which people, even those with not very close political ideas, identify with a very specific cause or problem, such as the rejection of war, climate change or the freedom of the internet, and begin to join together first thanks to the digital sphere and then to organise themselves in person, in the different cities, generating this situation of specificity and autonomy of local action, which is nevertheless capable of being constantly connected to and signifying itself (empowering itself) with the actions or analogous communities of other cities in the world.

#29
For many years we have thought that certain dynamics could not go beyond the digital and that they would never occur in the physical world. Now it is clear to everyone that this is possible and has already happened in a wide variety of cases.

#30
The interesting thing is that we not only see how the dynamics have overflowed the digital, but also that they have been able to transform what usually happened in the physical world. For example, inventing new forms of protest, demonstration and dialogue in public space.

#31
In the case of the 15m we have seen them clearly. It is not a question of people simply taking to the streets to demonstrate. In fact, the citizens went out to ask for their right to the city and finally began to directly recognise and experience that there is an urban space that rightly belongs to all of us.

#32
Citizenship in the street was not limited to repeating a scenario or an already habitual practice, associated with the action of demonstrating and protesting, but it was activated to enable dialogue between people, inhabitants, to claim the right to the city and to begin to imagine how this could really be possible again.

#33
Citizens end up meeting not only to protest but directly to activate processes of solidarity and collective construction of what we today call the common.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I have thought of three ways to generate returns for the community:

  1. I will quote the contributors in the research;
  2. I will leave the entire methodology open so that others can replicate it;
  3. I will leave the contents in open access;

If you have suggestions about more ways to generate returns and in general to improve this experiment please read your comment right here on the blog.

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