Blog: Dan Power

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Virtual Worlds and Collective Intelligence Competancies

In my April 5, 2008 blog post, I quoted Jane McGonigal on alternate reality games, or ARGs. She claims "ARGs will provide a truly stimulating framework for doing everyday work." Supposedly alternate reality games help users develop 10 collective-intelligence competencies, like "influency", "emergensight" and "mobbability". I noted the skill names seem strange, but I promised to investigate and blog about the competencies/skills in a future posting. So this is what I uncovered and think.

First check Jane's powerpoint slides at http://www.slideshare.net/avantgame/10-collaboration-superpowers/. She defines the 10 collaboration and collective intelligence compentancies and skills. Her points have a * ...

Mobbability --> to me this means skill at synchronous work in large virtual teams

* The ability to do realtime work in very large groups.
* A talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously - "scalable collaboration"

Cooperation radar --> to me this means skill in selecting virtual teammates

* The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.

Ping quotient --> to me this means fast interaction and response

* Measures your responsiveness to other people's requests for engagement.
* Your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.

Influency --> to me this means building trust and exerting influence

* The ability to be persuasive in diverse social contexts and media spaces.
* Understanding that each work environment and collaboration space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.

Multi-capitalism --> to me this means skill in using all of one's skills and resources

* Fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, and financial.

Protovation --> to me this means innovation, rapid prototyping and rapid response

* Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles.
* Ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure.

Open authorship --> to me this means content sharing with appropriate attribution of authorship

* Creating content for public consumption and modification.

Longbroading --> to me this means examining the current and future context of a situation, taking a broad, holistic view

* Thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture.

Emergensight --> to me this means intellectual flexibility, situational awareness and planning skills

* The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity.

Signal/noise management --> to me this means selective scanning and information load management

* Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from massively multiple streams of data.

Well Jane, I still don't like the terms you use, but I think my skills in all these areas are improving from my experiences in the virtual world called Second Life.

Source: Harvard Business Review; February 2008, Vol. 86 Issue 2, pp. 17-45.

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