Towards Smarter Activism: Working Together Without Even Knowing it.

The question of how to work towards positive social change is not easily answered. There is no silver bullet and one size does not fit all. Local contexts vary as do the people and the issues they face within those contexts. The fact that there will be a multiplicity of efforts is obvious. What is not obvious is how those efforts work together and leverage each other — or don't. Clearly the possibility of success will depend on how well these efforts coordinate with each other — intentionally, of course, but implicitly as well because direct communication is often impossible. But how does that happen?

Explicit and Implicit Coordination

The idea of integrating various tools and systems is central to our vision of collective intelligence for the common good (CI4CG) / civic intelligence. One core idea involves developing a framework of coordination that would encourage planned and unplanned cooperation among people who may or may not be working together directly. The latest incarnation of this work is developing a broad cognitive map of civic intelligence which was initiated at our workshop at the Community and Technology 2015 conference in Troyes, France. Ideally this map will be used for characterizing, comparing, and cultivating CI4CG efforts. One of our main chores is helping to uncover and encourage synergy and to help nudge "individual" projects into broader, more integrated and mutually supporting hyper-projects.

The following list of various "sharables" provides a fairly extensive list of ways to coordinate and support this mutual work:

• shared themes or challenge focus (not necessarily determined via specific grant programs);
• shared methodology, vocabulary, models;
• shared aspirations, goals, manifestos;
• shared codes of ethics;
• shared plans;
• data interchange, APIs, taxonomy, ontology;
• shared projects;
• shared research agendas;
• shared project members;
• shared awareness;
• shared communicative venues (structured and unstructured; virtual, in-person, and hybrid);
• shared commitments;
• shared online repositories, portals, test-beds;
• shared services; and
• shared knowledge of community roles.

We expect to pursue a variety of activities including events such as workshops at appropriate venues and more collaborative research and action projects. We will expand and publicize projects and opportunities and lobby for more. Generally we will help with connections — tools, venues, framework, methodologies.

These steps include developing and improving our community / network, pursuing and refining our research agenda, carrying out various experiments, documenting our work and ensuring ready access to the results, understanding challenges and opportunities, cultivating fruitful community partnerships, and generally construing this enterprise as an ongoing and perpetual project. Because the enterprise is so broad a continuing learning cycle based on the enterprise as a whole — its effectiveness, reach, and influence — should be embedded in our processes in what could be called collaborative meta-cognition.

This work includes products such as deliberative systems, research enterprises and case studies, think tanks, model policy documents, curricula, ruminations and epistles, thought experiments, art works, and many others. While this work continues to promote rigorous research, it consciously seeks to integrate and build upon other perspectives. We hope to transcend the constraints of many dominant habits, institutions, and norms, especially when their strict obedience compels us to work in ways that are likely to be ineffective in addressing the common good of the planet and its inhabitants.

We hope that by modeling the world we’d like to see we can obtain insights that would be difficult to acquire through other means. Beyond conducting research and developing tools, services, policy, and the like, we are hoping to build the circumstances that help promote this work and the orientation in the world. To these ends we are especially eager to work with the people worldwide who share this vision and with those who are already conducting this critical work.