Talk about an idea whose time has come.  MIT will officially launch on Friday the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), a new research center whose goal to understand how to harness the power of large numbers of people—connected together through Internet and other technologies —to better solve a range of business, scientific, and societal problems.  The center involves faculty from the Sloan School of Management, the Media Laboratory, the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Leadership Center and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
 
“The recent successes of things like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems,” said CCI Director Thomas Malone, author of the influential 2004 book, The Future of Work, which examined how information technology enables business to organize itself in new ways. “At CCI, our basic research question is:  How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?”

As an example, Malone cites the process of writing books. “Today’s publishing industry is built on the assumption that books are written by a single author—or at most a few people.  But Wikipedia shows that very different approaches may be possible.  What if, for instance, certain kinds of books could be written by large numbers of people with very little central direction?”    

On Friday, CCI will announce an experiment to create just this kind of new example of collective intelligence.  The joint project by CCI, the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, and Pearson Publishing is expected to involve thousands of people who will collectively write a book–Wikipedia-style–about how to use communities in business. 

“In the long run,” Malone said, “this movement toward more decentralized decision-making in business may be as important a change for business as the change to democracies was for governments.”

The Friday launch will be webcast live.  Check here for details.