In his email, @Jerry called our attention to the EU Collective Intelligence Summit of next week. He also mentioned, “we often use this list to share things going on of interest.” That triggered the following stream of consciousness.
Yeah, the “collective intelligence summit” theme is certainly both OGMy and Technoshamany 
. Unfortunately, this one, just like most other events about the same subject, speaks about and not from it. I.e. The event designers don’t use the great brain power present in the conference hall, physical or virtual, for turning its collection of intelligence into a collective intelligence, beyond the eventual break-out rooms that, typically, lead to nowhere.
Well, maybe that’s not “unfortunate” because it gives us the opportunity for a truly trailblazing global event where CI wouldn’t only be the topic but CI principles and practices would be fully embedded in how it is designed, facilitated, and harvested.
Why not celebrate the global premiere of OGM with a masterfully designed unconference or virtual fair, where if someone wants to be a presenter, s/he would need to accept an answer from us, like, “only if you’re willing to participate in the practices for augmenting the CI of the whole event.”
For those of us curious about the history of the efforts to co-create CI-boosting public events, there’s a “Collective Intelligence Convergence” write-up about what I started with my friend, Tom Atlee, back in 1993. Those efforts culminated, in 2007, in the design of the Collective Intelligence and Human Choice that was going to be a CI convergence event.
That plan didn’t materialize but both of the documents referenced above have plenty of mineable insights for future organizers of CI-augmenting events. The only tangible outcome from those efforts was that many of the invitees morphed into co-authors of the 648-page COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating Prosperous World at Peace anthology, to which I contributed a couple of chapters. (You can get the book on Kindle for $3.69.)
But not all of my big unconference organizing efforts remained fruitless. With my friends I co-designed and facilitated, in 1998, the Knowledge Ecology Fair, a highly successful, month-long virtual event attended by 400 participants from all over the world and complete with all this:
So, if my team could accomplish that, with some corporate sponsorship, 32 years ago, why couldn’t we, OGMers, not celebrate collective intelligence & wisdom with a global virtual fair, complete self-organizing workshops, virtual booths of CI tool and process startups, knowledge café, etc.? Just an idea worth pondering…
