MIT has launched their Center for Collective Intelligence

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies–especially the Internet–now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that–collectively–they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?