The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence was officially launched today with a modest amount of speechifying and the announcement of an intriguing new experiment to create a Wikipedia-style community-authored book about how to use communities in business.

Called We Are Smarter Than Me, the book/project’s home is an online community and wiki managed by Shared Insights where  business professionals are encouraged to research, discuss and write about the impact of social networks on traditional business functions. Everyone is invited to participate in the publishing project but as a kind of quality assurance invitations were issued to specific lists generated by Wharton Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Pearson and Shared Insights.

The project has an advisory committee of industry experts like Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales; Alph Bingham, who runs the InnoCentive web community, which matches top scientists with R&D projects, and Tom Malone, a senior faculty member at MIT Sloan and director of the MIT CCI.

“Since the beginning of publishing, books have been written by individuals or by small groups of people (experts). This has even applied to recent books that describe the power of community intelligence,” says Malone.  “We Are Smarter Than Me will test this paradox, and determine whether a community of authors can write a compelling book better than individual experts.” 

The product of the We Are Smarter research and wiki will “probably be” a network book to be published by Pearson in 2007. Each contributing member of the community will be listed as an author of the book, and each will receive an equal vote on the distribution of book royalties to charity.

“No matter what happens with the book, it’s going to be interesting,” Malone says, which is probably an understatement.  The chapters that are currently started (and many have yet to have entries) look quite interesting, if somewhat familiar to those of us who follow this stuff on a daily basis.

Malone also announced another wiki called The Handbook of Collective Intelligence which he hopes will become a definitive survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research.