Lots of information recently on the topic of collective intelligence and distributed decision making (web 2.0, decision 2.0, project management 2.0 etc. . .).

George Siemen’s blog looks at the report Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. He notes; “The data is current provided as images. It would be useful to navigate the resulting “map of science” in an interactive application”.  When this comes-to-pass, it would really represent a powerful web 2.0 app and a data tool for ideas.

The Many Worlds Blog discusses Eric Bonabeau’s Sloan management review article on Decision Making 2.0. (1-9-2009)  They note 2 concluding suggestions by Bonabeau

“First, collective intelligence tends to be most effective in correcting individual biases in the overall task area of (idea) generation” and

‘Second, because most applications lack a strong feedback loop between generation and evaluation, “companies should consider deploying such feedback loops with greater frequency because the iterative process taps more fully into the power of a collective.”’

This could really be realized if there were two more developments like clickstream data.

1. If disciplinary research agendas would become more self-organized by being more connected to the collective 2.0 world, because research is just such a feedback loop that Bonabeau is calling for, and
2. We had a better aggregator for research results.  There is too much research and knowledge being generated to use, at least in a way that taps into collective intelligence.  This would make the leap from idea generation 2.0 to evaluation 2.0.

Finally Andrew Filev in the Project Management 2.0 blog (referencing Seth Godin) says that collective intelligence still needs leadership (as in a leader of the project tribe).  It seems like this is a re-introduction of bias back into the system, but maybe some bias can be productive for getting things done.  I’m not sure.