Impact Trust • Working glossary

Collective intelligence

\Shared understanding that emerges when many people's knowledge is combined.

Details

Our Take
Fairly accessible; increasingly used in tech and governance circles. The key distinction from crowdsourcing: collective intelligence involves shared reasoning and sense-making, not just collecting inputs.
Examples of Use
Dark Matter Labs, Cynefin, participatory methods
Synonyms/Variants
Distributed cognition; Swram intelligence, Wisdom of the group
Typical everyday wording
Thinking together rather than individually