Conversence is reimagining the conversations of tomorrow. We want to reinvent the practice of group conversations, to replace shallow reactions and community polarization with convergence: a deeper mutual understanding of issues, enabling community-scale collaboration with the aim of achieving deliberative democracy. We were among the leading designers of the innovative collective intelligence tool Assembl, a unique synthesis of social software and concept mapping. We are developing this platform further, under the name of IdeaLoom, to support a new level of collective intelligence.
If you have a complex problem and a diverse community, you can harness collective intelligence to achieve a shared understanding of the issue, co-create and refine better solutions, and take informed joint decisions. However, collective intelligence covers a range of practices and tools, each of which has its own biases and pitfalls: naive collective decision strategies could allow the largest or loudest faction to push its agenda, which might not solve the problem and could even exacerbate tensions. If you want true collaborative collective intelligence, beyond aggregation, competition or groupthink, you can rely on our expertise of how different platforms shape communication processes and decisions.
We have studied the advantages and limitations of many communication, collaboration and collective intelligence platforms: mailing lists, wikis, idea voting, predictive markets, and we have built the IdeaLoom platform to allow new forms of collaboration. We can advise you on when and how to use which tool to reach your goals, and we can help you get your IdeaLoom conversation off the ground. Beyond this, if you need something tailored to your specific community and processes, our unique understanding of the IdeaLoom platform allows us to adapt it to those needs, or to explore combination with other collective intelligence tools if needed.