By Elena Zamora (La troca)
We’re talking about, like you commented at the beginning, who are our references, what the movements of popular universities are, of cultural centers… We want La Troca to have a very strong community aspect. We believe that, it cannot be that I, because I have decided it, mark the pedagogical line or whichever line, but instead we believe in the collective construction of knowledge, that is to say, we don’t want the three people of La Troca, as we are hired as right now, non-salaried, to decide its future, but rather we want to count on different points of view because, in the end, as more people join, the result of what we want to create is going to be much richer. Then, we understand a collective intelligence as that in which each and every one of us decide what our objectives are.
By Carlos Muñoz (Wikitoki)
I think that collective intelligence is what intelligence always used to be considered as until, all of a sudden, it was straightjacketed, people wanted to put it within a framework in which there was a part of the population that had it and the rest didn’t. And then it become something unidirectional that came from a body of knowledge and intelligence and was transmitted to everyone else, who are the ignorant population, so to say. But before that, well intelligence is what was created between everyone. The answer to any challenge was solved with a collective response. So this thing about collective intelligence would a contemporary way to call something that has always been here. In the case of Wikitoki, the act of uniting many small collectives in order to be a little stronger as one large collective, well that would be a form of intelligence of positioning oneself. There are times when we refer to lobbies, well this would be a lobby of social innovation without the negative connotation that the word ‘lobby’ can have today. The most intelligent thing was to unite and begin to create together. And maybe all the protocols and all of what we call the codes of Wikitoki could be understood as a knowledge, a collective intelligence, we’re in the process of opening this code right now. One of the projects of last year consisted, precisely, of opening this code and seeing how it could reach more people so that it could be replicable in other models or so that people could remix it. The idea that one can see in the name also of “wiki” is to not only generate knowledge but above all share it and share it in a useful way; that’s to say, not only to dump it out in its brute form but to process information so that it’s actually understandable. We’re talking about transparency that consists not only in opening things up but opening them in a way that is understandable.
