Collective Intelligence as Community Discourse and Action

Collective Intelligence (CI) research investigates the design of infrastructures to enable collectives to think and act intelligently -- even more intelligently than individuals. Technologies such as idea management or argumentation tools, blogs, wikis, chats, forums, Q&A sites, and social networks provide unprecedented opportunities for entire communities or organizations to express a discourse and act at a massive scale.

This workshop at CSCW 2012 on Collective Intelligence as Community Discourse and Action seeks to understand the forms of CI that can be constructed through discourse and action, which enables advanced forms of collective sensemaking such as idea generation and prioritization, argumentation, and deliberation. When does effective discourse help a collective outperform individuals? What functions should the next generation of social platforms support? How can we allow communities to efficiently manage many diverse ideas, argument, and deliberate? What patterns in discourse and action can be modeled computationally?