CICOLAB hosts 90-minute roundtable discussions, which take place online (usually via Zoom; though we are experimenting with alternatives like Jitsi and Big Blue Button). We record these conversations and post them unlisted on YouTube (you can turn off your video if you prefer) after lovingly cleaning up and editing the transcriptions, highlighting and creating condensed summaries, and putting them in our knowledge garden for you to to easily discover, harvest, and spread the most important points. Explore the videos, notes, and transcriptions to previous roundtable discussions on our Workflowy repository https://workflowy.com/s/roundtable-discussio/Mc3nAtF9cCufuBQi or check out some quick quotes on our Pinterest page (no need to have Pinterest installed).

 

New! International Sensemaking Roundtables
in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian

At CICOLAB we're convinced that the more new voices we bring in to our community, the better we can sense and feel the major themes emerging from our shared experience of CoronaVirus. In our second roundtable cycle, we are hosting four non-English sessions around "Sensemaking and the Pandemic." These sessions are designed to be easy enough to follow for those who lack full fluency, helped by slower speech and visual aids. We know that diversity is critical to collective intelligence. Thus we're proactively aiming to be more inclusive of new perspectives, in a welcoming and supportive space that encourages authenticity and co-learning.

 

Rapid Sensemaking and the Pandemic – Topics

Sensemaking and the Pandemic in Spanish

Gathering perspectives on Covid-19 from around the world.

Sensemaking and the Pandemic in French

Gathering perspectives on Covid-19 from around the world.

Deep Profiles

In this informal session (May 30, 2020) with the GCC's Barnraising group led by Sam Hahn, we develop a process for peer-produced reputation profiles.

Video

Mutual Aid

How can we support each other during this time? Trust networks may hold the key to thriving in the future.

Crap Detection Round 2 + Peeragogy Pattern Jam

A follow-up to our previous discussion at MetaCAugs, again featuring special guests Howard Rheingold plus Rapid Sensemaking and Peeragogy crews. June 9 at 3pm EST, 9pm CET (see calendar for details)

Sensemaking and the Pandemic in Portuguese

Gathering perspectives on Covid-19 from around the world.

The New Story

When we integrate the information from different fields and cultures, what is the story that starts to develop?

Crap Detection

May 19, 2020 MetaCAugs epic 5-hour session featuring special guests Howard Rheingold and founders of Peeragogy, Rapid Sensemaking, and ApocalypseDAO, discussing "Data, Metrics, and Crap Detection" through the lens of the pandemic.

Video

Full transcript

Notes

Apocalypse DAO

How can we create a new kind of insurance product to protect us from the unthinkable, for people who can't afford personal rescue helicopters?

Sensemaking and the Pandemic in Italian

Gathering perspectives on Covid-19 from around the world.

 
 

Our Calendar

 

Making it easier to find the people, projects, and ideas that inspire us

When the postal service made it possible to send an envelope anwhere in the world, they revolutionized communications and allowed a flourishing of knowledge. We are creating something similar, for people and ideas.


Today, the problem we need to solve is exactly the opposite:
It's so easy to send virtual envelopes around the world, we can no longer keep up with the information overload.

 

Our greatest problem is making sense of the mental chaos:
What do we absolutely need to know, and how do we connect to the people, ideas, projects, software and other tools we resonate with on a deep soul level?

CICOLAB is the social "watering hole" facilitating connections that create sparks. We create the conditions for great projects and great people to find each other and actually do things together using resources that already exist within our network. And being passionate "network weavers", we know a lot of great people.

 

Open, transparent and participatory design

One of the core aspects of CICOLAB is structuring, maintaining and growing a detailed knowledge repository of everything we do and each conversation we facilitate. We are using Workflowy, the easiest and most intuitive software we could find, to organize our documents and task lists, recorded interviews/roundtables and protocols.

If you have video, audio, or written materials relevant to a particular discussion, please let us know and feel welcome to contribute. If you want to get involved, learn more, or might share ideas for us to improve, we would love to hear from you!

 

Email us at collectiveintelligencecolab@gmail.com.

Find us on Twitter (@cicollaboratory)

and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/collectiveintelligencecollaboratory/)

 

Also, please join our knowledge gardening annotation group on Hypothes.is.

Our Values

OPEN TO DIVERSE FORMS OF WISDOM

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We believe in data-driven decision-making and academic rigor, but we also know that you don't have to have an MBA or a PhD or be a CEO to have valid, life-tested wisdom. We want to make sure our participants feel their opinions are valid and important, no matter what their background. Data alone can show important patterns, but it is missing critical contextual information available only from conversations. The more diversity in viewpoints we can attract to our roundtables, the greater our collective wisdom.

PERMISSIONLESS INNOVATION

People shouldn't need to feel like they have to ask for approval in order to show some initiative. We should all should feel empowered to produce and experiment with new technology, business, governance and food system models.

RAPID SENSEMAKING

Our strategy to help people and organizations make better decisions by giving them access to a variety of sensemaking tools and methods to help accurately assess where they are in the ecosystem, what information is most relevant to them, and who to partner with to optimize success. With streams of information flooding in and floating by, how do we best make sense of it all?

FOSTER LEARNING

Giving agency to participants creates an environment of freedom to ask questions and make suggestions, increasing the depth and flow of communication, essential information and contextual intelligence.

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OPENNESS

We don’t know who will make the best contributions, so we're removing the technical barriers to participation.

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INCENTIVES

How do we judge which contributions are meaningful, and how do we reward them? Which tasks have intrinsic value, how to assess such value, and what is the crap work that needs to be remunerated?

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