Collective Cognition Realtime Deck

Open Research Institute: Pitch Jam

The purpose of this document is a public place for patcon to gather thoughts on a recent project direction.

Project

participation interface (data collection): code // demo // storybook

analysis backend (data processing): see valency-anndata below

exploration interface (data foraging): #todo

The Pitch

hi, I'm patcon. I'm an ex-biochemist, a civic tech community organizer of 10 years, and an independent collective intelligence researcher with a tool called Polis since 2016. I'm interested in origin of life research that understands aliveness as processes composed of cycles, compartments, and diversity in all strata of information.

Motivation

VALENCE. I'm interested in the way people feel called to move toward and away from information. This might be agreement/curiosity on one end, or dissent/repulsion/boredom on the other. This is not unlike bacteria moving up chemical gradients toward nutrients or down them away from toxins.

BROADCAST. I'm interested in the wasted potential of broadcast. We squander our attention on systems and actors that pretend to mirror us, but so rarely reflect who we sense ourselves to be. We have the capacity for complex and nuanced internal reactions. These reactions might not always be wise in our most atomic individual sense, but what if in aggregate they can be of service to our sensemaking?

MAPS. What if we could see ourselves in a map more complex than the left-right number line of politics? What if we could use the felt experience of our assent/dissent to place ourselves within a map of human perspectives, in response to any stream?

BOUNDARIES. If the world was truly left and right, us and them, this would mean a single, simple boundary. One site of tension, over which our differences must be resolved into a shared path forward, through conversation. But what if there are more dimensions than 1D? What if those new dimensions hold more groups than we can currently conceive and see together. And if there are more groups, does that not mean there's a combinatorial explosion of boundaries that must exist, each one an essential conversation. Three groups produce 3 boundaries. Four produce 6. Five produce 10 boundaries – 10 conversations over which to negotiate the shared path forward.

STRANGE-LOOP COMPOSITION. What if the hosts of our broadcast media could point the camera back on us, and show us the high-resolution and up-to-date realtime map of who we are together? And what if these hosts had an interface to help us understand this shiny new surface of collective introspective, dialing down or selecting facets of our group identity, like an artist mixing tracks? Could they guide us through interpretation of the self we see? What might we be capable of, if one morning we looked out into a broadcast, and together saw a red mark floating on our collective forehead?

Research Direction

I’d like to move from making maps of human perspectives to making the equivalent of a digital audio workstation (DAW) for mixing audience perspectives into an interactive experience. The goal is to allow broadcast hosts and live event hosts to compose experiences live, and explore the perspective space of the audience alongside that same audience. I’d like to convert a continuous stream of valence reactions (toward/neutral/away feelings) into an audience map that groups people with similar patterns of reaction together.

This effort will require

• distilling familiar UI and UX affordances from DAW software
• figuring out how to incorporate and move between semantic space (map of content) and perspective space (map of people)
• learning how to make it fun and visual (maybe even audio)
• easily amplifying chat and interaction from different parts of the map (“I want to hear from the chat coming from this side of perspective space”)
• stretch goal: how can the driver role be passed through the crowd like a mic
• stretch goal: how can this be used at live events in the public square

Why Me

I’m an expert facilitator. I’ve been coorganizing anarchic weekly civic hacknights of 50-70 attendees for almost a decade. Sandy Pentland’s “Social Physics” is my community organizing bible, along with Emergent Strategy. We haven’t missed a single week in over a decade of events. Our bus factor is phenomenal, and you need to kill like two dozen people to stop our events from happening. I understand the subtle forces that act in the space between people.

I have the conceptual biological underpinning to continue to transpose mathematical techniques from single-cell genomics to collective intelligence. These techniques have been developed by the large scientific community at great cost, and put through their paces in disease intervention. I know how to port them to the domain of collective intelligence. I understand living processes

I’ve been a foremost international expert on the Polis collective intelligence tool for almost a decade. I’ve given workshops on it a many conferences, and been consulted by national governments. I’ve hosted weekly calls for years. The ex environment minister of Panama called me his mentor. Puja Ohlhaver once introduced me as “a deep thinker in prosocial mechanism design”. I’ve met with and been in dialogue with the creators of leading dimensional reduction algorithms, like UMAP and PaCMAP. I’ve contributed code to these projects. I’ve built my own research tools (“valency-anndata”), and received praise from other tool builders in the single-cell -omics community.

Budget

I currently live on very little. I eat cold oatmeal and instant coffee. I work in the public library. I live rent-free on a cot in my sisters basement, in exchange for childcare. I steal groceries when my funds get low and AI credits feel more important.

I live on about CAD$15K/yr. I would like to live better.

Living in Toronto should require at least CAD$50,000/yr. I’d like to buy a new macbook to run new dimensional reduction algorithms in realtime: +CAD$3500. A Claude Max 20x plan would mean I could build as fast as I’d like: +USD$2400.

Sketches

Background

Post: Valence swarming & perspective maps

https://nodescription.substack.com/p/valence-swarming-and-perspective 

Building On

perspective map explorer

Google Maps for human perspective cartography, extending concepts of Polis.

code // demo

Every dot on the map is a person who reacted to crowdsourced statements related to complex issues – agree, disagree, pass – on sometimes 100s of statements. Dots make land, land shows differences in patterns of reaction and belief. Paint to outlines groups. Click groups to see what beliefs set them apart. View and create arbitrary data layers over people to better understand.

valency-anndata

A research toolkit for making sense of polislike human reaction data.

code // docs

A tool for processing, dimensionally reducing, and sensemaking around high dimensional agree/disagree/pass valence data. Easy import of data from Polis and other sources. Easily analyse with bleeding edge math tools. Easy export to standard formats that can be loaded into other exploratory tools (e.g. perspective map explorer).

To Process

• https://github.com/hanxiao/pacmap-mlx
• https://github.com/hanxiao/umap-mlx
• https://arxiv.org/html/2603.04035v1

• https://github.com/hanxiao/mlx-vis 

Inspiration

• https://fieldofvision.org/do-not-split
• https://edwardcarpenter.net/ectd1.htm
• https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement
• https://g0v.tw/intl/en/ 

feedback

• patcon: any critique, confusion or expressions of interest are welcome!
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about patcon

https://nodescription.net/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/patcon-/

https://twitter.com/patcon_

https://bsky.app/profile/patcon.bsky.social

https://github.com/patcon

patrick.c.connolly@gmail.com