About the Journal

ISSN
The journal will apply for an ISSN number as soon as the number of published articles allows it.

Aims and Scope

Collective Intelligence is a recent term addressing the phenomena encircling collective performance and understanding. It specifically considers how human ingenuity, creativity and resilience can be leveraged in an increasingly connected, dynamic and technologically augmented world. Considering Collective Intelligence intends to enlighten the prospects, potential, and opportunities resulting from our human urge to tackle pressing and complex grand challenges - and is dedicated to understanding ways in which we can advance our societal, economic, and technological capacities. As a discourse, Collective Intelligence embraces insights from a diverse set of research domains, and stands for a new beginning and an unchartered journey to discover novel boundaries for our future societies.

Collective Intelligence Perspectives (CIP) provides a global forum for trans-disciplinary scholarly enquiry that assumes systemic perspectives on the collective phenomena relating to information, communication, and control between human actors and in organizations.

Collective Intelligence Perspectives is a journal devoted to advancing our repertoire of mindsets, perspectives, and distinctions towards collective intelligence as it is observed and conceptualized amongst organizations, technologies, our environments, and ourselves. The journal intends to publish scholarly work from a variety of disciplines who share the concern of discovering new systemic principles, advancing methods of inquiry on collective phenomena, articulating stimulating impulses for (trans-) disciplinary progress, and opening new ways to leverage collective structures to improve social, ecological, and economic outcomes.

To this end, Collective Intelligence Perspectives embraces a policy of creative rigor by publishing peer-reviewed, open-access, scholarly opinion papers, essays, as well as exchanges. Exchanges are the collective product of several contributors and take the form of well-articulated critical essays, opinions and provocations, peer commentaries and responses, insightful reports on practice phenomena and prototypical applications, as well as reviews and syntheses. The journal also covers multimedia formats, such as interviews, conversations or performances. The journal is not aimed at publishing original empirical work; however, arguments should draw on empirical insights or otherwise justified reasoning in their arguments.

The journal aims at contributions that advance trans-disciplinary discourse and provide insights for academia as well as practice, and particularly for the transfer of insights between both domains. A particular concern of the journal is to give young authors the opportunity to present their analyses and suggestions to a broader public.

The journal Collective Intelligence Perspectives is published and coordinated on a not-for-profit basis by the Society for Managerial and Social Cybernetics (GWS Society) and hosted by the Department for General Business Management and Operations Management at University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Focus and Vision

Collective Intelligence Perspectives advocates a broad and inclusive view of Collective Intelligence. We understand Collective Intelligence as a uniting term that is significantly distinct, yet timely and able to draw considerations from diverse origins.

The journal was founded by the Society for Managerial and Social Cybernetics (GWS Society), a not-for-profit academic organization that advocates trans-disciplinary systems thinking and cybernetics in research and practice since 1968. GWS Society is established as the German registered association Gesellschaft für Wirtschafts- und Sozialkybernetik e.V. and acts as the governing body of the journal.

Systems thinking originated from the insight that universal structures and dynamics govern our living environment as well as ourselves, machines, and organizations. Over the past decades, we have developed the means to articulate such dynamics in systemic languages across the disciplines.

Today, in the Anthropocene, we are confronted with unprecedented challenges related to environmental and social changes vis-à-vis our social, political, and economic systems. The persistent digitalization of our social worlds and environments forces us to rethink our cooperative and technology-enhanced human action and imposes the necessity to collectively cognize, ideate, and implement responses to these grand societal challenges.

The systems sciences, systems thinking, and cybernetics have advanced our understanding of how information and communication generate organization; and how management, dialogue, coordination and control enable to cope with the complexity of related phenomena. Today, we strive to advance beyond this knowledge in order to better understand how we can conceive and design a new breed of systems characterizable as socially and technologically networked and intelligent, resilient, regenerative and emergent.

Collective intelligence therefore carries a new tenet for the systems community and other disciplines, in that it calls for ideas, opinions, experiences and research on the determining foundations, principles, structures and dynamics of such new artificial and social systems, which as of now, have to be rigorously conceived. The journal therefore invites soliciting the diversity of views present in the systems community and beyond.

The phenomena and application fields of potential interest for Collective Intelligence Perspectives may encompass insights that affect our understanding of the following issues:

  • Conceptualizing Collective Intelligence to consider, define and/or distinguish the depth and breadth of forms and means of (collective) ‘intelligence’, distinguish and relate individual intelligence with collective intelligence, and discuss how forms and means of Collective Intelligence can best be understood, recognized and operationalized.
  • Coordinating large numbers of people to address grand societal challenges, including climate change, rising population, inequality, resource consumption, or environmental pollution, as well as to leverage the intelligence of crowds
  • Integrating human and machine intelligence for making predictions, enhancing awareness, or extending our human capabilities
  • Leveraging social organization and social computing to tackle, discuss, negotiate and agree about complex and interdependent problems in business and society
  • Researching and applying distributed artificial intelligence and other cutting edge, intelligent computing systems for social or business purposes
  • Enhancing our understanding of organizations across levels, from the level of global, super-national and networked organizations to body-attached sensors, to discern new ways to sense and define organization
  • Designing information infrastructures and digital platforms to facilitate the adaptation of communication and interaction structures in large-scale social and economic systems
  • Describing the behavior of networks, including the behavior of people, organizations, and institutions when pursuing individual or coupled by overarching goals
  • Modelling the dynamics of systems archetypes that enlighten our understanding of the emergence of viable and resilient systems from distributed, enmeshed and rhizomatic infrastructures
  • Policy experimenting to discover the dynamics of how diversity, ethics, innovation and ingenuity can be injected into our social contexts and organizational fabrics
  • and others more.

Collective Intelligence Perspectives also invites contributions that distinctly reconsider our repertoire of traditional systemic concepts, such as:

  • System analysis, synthesis and gestalt
  • Diversity, resilience, robustness, adaptability, sustainability and ethics
  • Space and time, navigation, cognition, perception, presence, virtuality, and materiality
  • Variety, complexity, decomposition, topography, autonomy, hierarchy and heterarchy
  • Autopoiesis, recursivity, feedback, and self-referentiality
  • Discourse, observability, homeostasis, circularity, resonance and inference
  • and others more

Open Access Policy

The journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge for the sake of innovation and freedom. The journal intends to fulfil the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) definition of open access. This includes that “the copyright holder of a scholarly work grants usage rights to others using an open license (Creative Commons or equivalent) allowing for immediate free access to the work and permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose” (source: DOAJ website, February 2022). The journal does not support, or make use of, Impact Factors.

Licensing and Copyright Terms

All articles are published according to the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which principally allows sharing (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapting (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially), as long as the authors and license are attributed for. I.e., you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You should carefully review all of the actual terms and conditions of the actual Creative Commons license before using the licensed material.

The journal grants authors to retain the copyright of their papers without restrictions. Authors may grant the publisher non-exclusive publishing rights to publish the articles. Specifically, the journal allows authors to retain the rights to use the substance of the article in future works, including lectures and books; reproduce the article for one's own purposes, provided that article copies are not offered for sale; and self-archive the article.

Author Charges and other Charges or Fees

The journal does not charge any fees to authors. Authors cannot charge any fees or other charges to the journal.

Archiving

Following the initial establishment of an ISSN number and DOAJ listing, the editorial team of the journal intends to seek archiving as part of the DOAJ preservation initiatives.

History and Call for Participation

The journal has been conceived during the year 2021 by the board of directors of the Society for Social and Managerial Cybernetics (GWS e.V.). As of 2023, the journal is in its initiation stage.

The journal’s editorial board invites all scholars and knowledgeable professionals who are interested in the overall theme of Collective Intelligence to apply for an active role in the journal. We particularly encourage applications of people from underrepresented groups, indigenous peoples, as well as persons with disabilities, racialized persons, and women, in our efforts to embrace ethnic, gender and sexual diversity and towards equitable treatment.

Please note that no remunerations for any activities can be granted by the journal or its governing body GWS e.V. Ci Letters does not publish advertising on its website.