Incoma Project - Description

We are witnessing a unique moment in history in which the collective is becoming the major agent of change in our society. From new forms of collective creation, analysis and dissemination of knowledge and information (e.g. Wikipedia, Twitter, Wikileaks), through collective politics (like Occupy Wall Street or the 15M movement), collective economy (either in the acquirement of funds through crowdfunding tools, or in the increasing tendency toward collective enterprise models), or collective culture (with the explosion of copyleft licenses and the increasingly common collaborative work tools through Internet), to metion just a few; every part of our lives seem to be crossed by the idea of ​​the collective as a key new way of doing and thinking.

However, we notice how despite the infinite potential we discovered in it, all the existing tools focused on the use of collaborative work are still based on designs that ignore precisely the term "collective" in the core of their structure. We see how they work only for very small groups, or for large groups whenever the interactions are minimized to very basic actions, by this reducing all the possible richness of collaborative work to a minimum. From discussion forums or collaborative writing tools such as etherpads, which, once a small critical mass is surpased, become chaotic and unusable, and the possibility of developing a collective intelligence disappears, to tools that do support a massive use, and actually obtain its power precisely from it, as Wikipedia or Twitter, but where the collective work is compartmentalized in thousands of semi-hermetic spaces of very small size (as would be each page of Wikipedia or each average contact network of Twitter) where again the interactions become possible, but only on a small scale, far from the initial massiveness; or the interaction between users is reduced to extremely basic actions, as the retweets on Twitter, the likes on Facebook, or the economic contributions on crowdfunding platforms, without allowing any richness or complexity in the interaction.

Our project aims to directly face this issue and to extract all the possible richness of collective interaction. For this we propose to first ignore the specific characteristics of each type of collaborative work, and to attack the problem focusing on the common characteristics shared by them all. From our point of view, the essential issue to be solved would be the issue of how to think collectively in large groups in a constructive way; reworded in a simpler way "how can many think together?". Having achieved that goal, whether the tool is used to together write a constitution, create a recipe, a graphic design, or to program a new software, depends only on the users who use it. We could even feed back the process, using the tool to think in new collaborative tools.

Therefore, the purpose of the project is to create a software that can be accessed via internet, whose objective is to allow users to discuss and think between them; specifically designed to allow massive access and interactions, without this implying the generation of noise and chaos as in traditional discussion tools, but real collective thoughts generated from thousands of contributions.

Once that first goal is reached, it would open the door to the design of specific tools within this software, focused on specific types of collaborative tasks, as might be graphic design, edition, writing, or any other that a user might be interested in developing.

The project would involve a multidisciplinary work in different stages.

First we would make a brief study of different tools and offline methods used to produce collective thought, noting their strengths and their weaknesses, which have motivated the presenting of this project and its choice of approach. From there we would continue with a research phase on collective thinking to understand the different processes that occur when thinking in a group, finding the ones that allow or block its advance. This would culminate in an investigation into the scalability of such processes, and into new processes that may be necessary for massive cases. For this first phase of the work we hope to be able to count on participants with expertise in fields such as philosophy, social interaction or group dynamics.

Secondly, we would come up with a design that implements in its interface what we learned in the previous phase, for which colaborators with expertise in design and user-tool interaction processes would be required. It would also be interesting to experiment with the collaboration of people with work experience in collective creation within large groups (like free software communities or projects like Wikipedia).

Lastly, we would enter the phase of the programming of the platform. We would therefore need expert advice on  programming and free software to decide what type of software could be  used to implement the previous design and to establish the right contacts. With this being set up, we would start programming, developing on different iterative cycles,  which could be held simultaneously with a testing phase that would serve as feedback for each cycle.

While we expect the process to be as open and enriching as possible, and its final courses to be taken and defined during its development, we will open the project with an already developed mockup proposal, as it could serve as raw material for the different phases, or at least to allow a clarification of what is sought. We will now briefly present the proposal.

This proposal is based on the following concepts:

-  Complex space. We propose to create a discussion space with a richer structure than the usual linear or flat one. The conversations will not be connected linearly or in a tree shape as in traditional  discussion tools, nor will be separated into hermetic compartments. Any pair of interventions within the entire space could be connected, and any thought will allow an unlimited number of connections.

- Clear  thinking. To facilitate thinking together, each type of thought  (eg.:  information,  opinion, proposal, etc.) and each type of connection between thoughts (eg.:  synthesis, questions, clarifications, etc) will be clearly differentiated in a visual way.

- Intelligent evolution /  Collective rating. Both thoughts and their connections will allow evaluations by the users, not only in terms of positive and negative, as is common in many other platforms, but through several different categories. The evaluation will strengthen or highlight parts of the network, making it grow and evolve in real time according to what the community thinks.

These points will allow thoughts, thought processes, ratings and their  mutual interactions to constructively pile up and lead to more complex and elaborate thoughts. Making a more powerful  intelligence emerge from thousands of small contributions.

A mockup of this first proposal, in which we clarify the previous points, can be found in the attached document. It can also be accessed online at the following address:

http://incomaproject.org/crystallizations/

In the least favorable scenario the project would allow the convertion of the former design into a usable prototype that would offer, from our point of view, a countless number of advantages over the existing discussion platforms today, and surely would open new paths in respect to collaborative work and thought, serving as a basis and inspiration for further developments.

Our goal is to advance decisive steps in the collective thinking problem and the tools around it, so we hope to form a working group committed to further develop the work beyond the workshops. We do not aspire to a mere research project or to produce unuseful prototypes, but to exploit, in a real way, the unimaginable potential of transforming the world and the relationships hidden in the collective capacity. We are facing a time of transition and opportunity unique in history, and we intend to use it to its full potential.