About this project

This pilot, spawned by Fellowship of the Link discussions, is creating a decentralised map of thinking tools to demonstrate decentralised solutions to collective intelligence.

Vision statement

tbd

Introduction

As explained originally in Building collective intelligence from social knowledge graphs, this is hopefully the first in "a series of pilot projects where:

  • the tools we have today are used to link ideas in a specific domain (and the people behind them) together in a decentralised way
  • in the process demonstrating decentralised collective intelligence
  • we learn from the experience to create a new iteration of slightly better tools as a result, along with a slightly bigger audience,
  • rinse, repeat."

(That post has been developed since into a series, starting here).

This pilot project is working with Massive Wiki. Future projects might try other solutions, or expand this one to work with them. As it's a pilot, moreover, any changes we experiment with here will not necessarily be mainstreamed back into the core massive.wiki sitebuilder.

How will this map be structured?

It's built from three types of file:

Personal profiles

Example: Mathew Lowry. Ideally everyone who rates the tools for the spidergraph provides something like this, as each profile ties the other two types of file together with a story about how a real person actually uses them. It includes:

  • a series of bullets mentioning different tools and techniques; these will appear automatically in the appropriate tool and technique pages (below)
  • the scores they give each tool they use; these are automatically added to the datastore which powers the spidergraph on the home page

Tools & Practices

These are both zettelkasten overviews:

  • Practice: describes a thinking tool practice, e.g., inbox curation It includes a brief description, link(s) and an automatically created list of the people who use this practice, along with the associated bullet from their profile describing how they use it
  • Tool: similar to a practice, but describes a thinking tool, e.g., roam research or Pocket, and
    • an automated list of people profiles which use it, along with the associated bullet from their profile describing how they use it
    • the scores they gave it (only actual scores included; blanks are not imported).

Spidergraph executive summary

The figure shows how these all link together and how the scores submitted via Personal Profiles are aggregated into a spidergraph, which provides a sort of "executive summary" entry Point on the home page:

an image with no alt text

Personal profiles are key because newcomers need stories as well as scores. Each personal profile therefore tells the reader: How* does this person combine Which Tools and Practices together*?

And in every file, of course, each mention of a Tool or Practice links to the zettelkasten overview for that Tool or Practice, where users can discover:

  • a description of the tool / practice
  • links to explore how different people use it, and the scores they gave it

More: