The MIT CCI (Center for Collective Intelligence) brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies, especially the Internet, are changing the way people work together. The goal of their research is to understand how to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by systems like Google, Wikipedia and Innocentive.

Their basic 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 ?

The MIT CCI was launched on October 13, 2006. Thomas W. Malone, Director of the Center, stated during the official launch that time has come to make collective intelligence a topic of serious academic study. The MIT CCI does four types of research :

1. collecting examples or case studies
2. create new examples to advance the state of the art and to learn new design principles
3. do systematic studies and experiments
4. develop new theories to help tie all these things together

The hope of the MIT CCI is that in the long run the research work done will help to understand new and better ways to organize businesses, to conduct science, to run governments, and, perhaps most importantly, to help solve the problems we face as society and as a planet.

A list of research projects is shown hereafter :

• Climate CoLab : harness the collective intelligence of large numbers of people
• Collective Prediction : make accurate predictions about future events
• Deliberatorium : integrate ideas from argumentation theory and social computing
• Nonlinear Negotiation : come to agreements about complex problems
• Enabling Knowledge Management : more powerful modes of knowledge management
• Distributed Collaboration : examine the various technologies and practices
• Sensible Organizations : new sensors embedded in wearable social badges
• Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) : help organizations to increase knowledge
• Identifying Trends Through Online Social Media Analysis : methods for predictive analytics (coolhunting)
• Genome of Collective Intelligence : taxonomy of organizational building blocks
• Measuring Collective Intelligence : instrument to predict the performance of groups
• Turkit : Java/JavaScript API for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk
• Soylent : word processor with a crowd inside
• Twitinfo : system for visualizing and summarizing events on Twitter