Obama White House and Collective Intelligence
As world leaders meet at the G20 London Summit this week, ValleyZen reflects on the following. What if you had the responsibility to resolve simultaneous national and international crises that consisted of and were dependent on resolving a number of diverse smaller crises? Is there an available resource for dealing with your dilemmas? People who believe Doug Engelbart’s epiphany about collective intelligence will likely say “Yes, this is a job for CI.”
Why Collective Intelligence? It is almost certain no single person possesses the information and intelligence to develop and get adopted a solution. The information and intelligence is spread over a number of individuals and groups. If those individuals collaborate with each other and the groups collaborate with each other, the probabilities of success is magnitudes greater than if a single individual or group undertakes to solve all the crises. Another benefit of using CI is that individuals and groups can be acting simultaneously.
The Obama Administration in conducting a series of White House conferences on the current crises appears to be utilizing 4 of the 5 Engelbart collective intelligence premises. The activities of the Web team building The White House Website is strong evidence the Administration also accepts the fifth premise of creating tools needed for easy collaboration between the public and the Federal Executive Branch of government.
However, in creating groups for each of Obama’s initiatives the Administration may be missing an opportunity to include members of the Collective Intelligence community to help determine what collaborative tools are needed and assistance in building those tools.
What do our ValleyZen readers think?
It must be hugely gratifying for Mr. Engelbart to see his CI idea being implemented on the highest level of the national politics. We are lucky to have a president, tuned into the 21. century field of science and technology. We are also lucky that he is willing to listen and learn. Everybody admits that the country faces unprecedented economic situation since the Great Depression; hesitating to take action could quickly turn a recession into a depression. Yet, nobody knows exactly what to do – because there is no precedent for this. The paradigm of “the market righting itself” requiring no government intervention has failed, as its staunch upholder, Alan Greenspan, sheepishly admitted in public – due to “human greed.” What a coincidence – the communist economy/regime plagued by the same symptoms – incompetence, greed, lack of social responsibility, also collapsed just two decades ago. We are now told that the best minds are gathered in this administration and working collectively on straightening out our celestial carriage. The only thing that can impede their success is their ego. Luckily, our President’s ego is in the right place. He undertook this Herculean task, because he felt called and the time was right for a huge change. People, unfamiliar with socialism, categorically dread and oppose government intervention and oversight of financial institutions. If total socialism didn’t work and total capitalism doesn’t work either, perhaps combining the two, since there is no new socio-economic paradigm, would be the best solution, given that the government itself isn’t corrupt.