Tapping into local Collective intelligence for more resilient, sustainable, and equitable communities

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Payam Aminpour
Postdoctoral Researcher
Johns Hopkins University

Groups can achieve amplified capacities to solve complex problems through building a collective pool of knowledge (cognition), mass cooperation and consensus (collaboration), and adjustment of their collective actions and behavior (coordination), such that the group ends up being superior to individuals acting alone. This group phenomenon is known as collective intelligence (CI). In his seminar, Dr. Aminpour shows how tapping into local communities’ CI can potentially help address their complex intertwined societal and environmental problems like climate change, ecosystem degradation, and overexploitation of natural resources. He uses examples of socio-environmental systems where humans, built, and natural environments are highly coupled, with lots of interactions between them, and he demonstrates how communities can generate CI to better understand, manage, and adapt to changes in these systems in a way that fosters sustainability, resilience, and social equity. He supports these claims with empirical evidence from his PhD dissertation and his current work. He then identifies a gap in using emergent technologies for harnessing CI in impacted communities; however, he is hopeful that the advancements in internet technologies and artificial intelligence provide us with enormous potentials and unprecedented opportunities for producing new forms of CI.