What is collective intelligence? Frank Escoubes, co-founder of the technology and consulting company Bluenove, describes it thus: “Collective intelligence starts in conversation and ends in engagement. From ideas to action. It is an art, a sport, a science, a culture, with a bit of magic. Call it enlightenment.” Put in the simplest terms possible, it’s the idea that we are more intelligent together than as individuals.
Hopefully, your interest is piqued; mine was 6 months ago when I joined Bluenove as CTO. I’d never worked in the collective intelligence industry before because, probably like you, it isn’t that well known among the technical community yet, except for data scientists working on natural language processing (NLP) or semantic or lexicographic analysis. I saw a huge set of challenges in this space. Firstly, how do you communicate the result of a collective intelligence initiative? Especially when we’re potentially talking about something on a massive scale, such as the Great National Debate, which was organized by President Macron in France following the Yellow Vests protests. Also, collective intelligence cuts across every single sector, domain, and department.
So how do we achieve collective intelligence? Let’s talk tech. The Assembl software is at the heart of the digital solution and it’s now a very mature platform, built with Python at the back end, PostgreSQL for the database, and ReactJS at the front end.
