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Abstract:

Google. Wikipedia. Threadless. All are well-known examples of large, loosely organized groups of people working together electronically in surprisingly effective ways. These new modes of organizing work have been described with a variety of terms - radical decentralization, crowd-sourcing, wisdom of crowds, peer production, and wikinomics.1 The phrase we find most useful is collective intelligence, defined very broadly as groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.

By this definition, collective intelligence has existed for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies are all groups of individuals doing things collectively that, at least sometimes, seem intelligent.