After watching the video talking about the maker movement and collective intelligence by professor James Paul Gee I got triggered by his sentence: ‘we exist today with an international maker movement, that it is easier today, for everyday people with no credentials, whether your seven or seventy, to make anything you want if you pay the learning curve’.

For me 4 features have to present to talk about collective intelligence:

Openness: everybody learns from each other and everybody brings his own set of skills and knowledge.
Peer to peer: the roles change constantly. You can be the teacher or the student. Age, sex, knowledge level does not matter
Sharing of information: everybody feels the trust of sharing their knowledge.
Worldwide: through digital means you can connect with the world.

I immediately thought of the TedX talk I saw about the open source agriculture initiative by MIT (https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/open-agriculture-openag/overview/). MIT teaches non-engineers how to build a food computer and how to link it up to their central computer. Then you can experiment with growing vegetables and plants by changing different parameters. MIT collects this data to make an open source database on how to grow food in the best conditions. Everybody can participate: schools, dads with sons (as I did), agriculture students, … . A worldwide community has been built that helps each other and challenges each other. This worldwide community is the affinity space mentioned by professor Gee.

Without realizing it, people are constantly taking part in these affinity spaces: closed groups on Facebook around one theme that interests you, discussion boards on reddit.com, gaming communities, …

Knowledge isn’t shared in linear way anymore, everybody learns form anybody; where they want and when they want. They come together to solve a problem in an environment of trust.