Evolving Collaborative Intelligence Future Salon

It has been a while since the Future Salon tackled the meta question that Doug Engelbart asked himself years ago and us at a Future Salon: As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

I am really happy to have Zann Gill on Friday the 20th of March to bring her perspective to that question: Evolving Collaborative Intelligence. Check out her amazing life journey. Years ago she even worked for Buckminster Fuller. 
Please RSVP http://is.gd/lj0A

Zann and I sat together a couple of weeks ago and thought about what we can do in the framework of a Future Salon to evolve the Collaborative Intelligence. May be even evolve the framework itself. Here is what we came up with:

Nature manifests directed innovation, with a series of “process design” principles that human-computer systems could emulate. Zann Gill will describe how the evolution of life harnesses innovation networks, directed processes that converge toward improved adaptation that could not be predicted in advance as a goal. These principles are applicable to smart systems that support cross-disciplinary, collaborative problem-solving as we face our greatest challenge, eco-sustainability. Collective intelligence, which taps the consensus “wisdom of crowds,” harnesses algorithms to transform diverse input into a better-than-average consensual output. In contrast, collaborative intelligence taps and retains the diversity of individuals, manifesting principles of evolutionary design, such as collaborative autonomy, to co-evolve by improving through time, innovating and adapting to continually changing ecosystems.

This talk will describe how Nature’s dynamic design process principles apply to practical problems faced by enterprise systems (from companies to social networks to cities and nations) to evolve more intelligent capacity for emergent pattern recognition, decision-making, and to converge gradually toward sustainable operations. 

Objective. To seed discussion about the role SAP Future Salon plays in enabling our collaborative intelligence to evolve smart meta-systems for sustainable futures. Applications to explore include sustainable business practices, rapid responder systems for emergencies, e-governance, and planning eco-cities.

Bio: Zann Gill (M.Arch. Harvard) worked as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation. Her entry to the international competition Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century, sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government, tied with Matsushita Corp. for first place and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki. She proposed a networked system of sixteen initiatives — a framework comprised of diverse interlinked components for urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. More recently at NASA she developed program plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. She founded DESYN lab to apply her method to "raise collaborative IQ."

Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation followed by questions and discussion.

SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross or Cafeteria depending on number of RSVPs. SAP is located at 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304[map]. Free and open to the public. Please spread the word and invite others, but be sure to RSVP http://is.gd/lj0A so we know how many people to expect.