Before dashboards, DAOs, Discord servers, Decidim, Slack threads, AI copilots and cursed Google Docs, there was the meeting: the ancient social technology where humans sit in a circle and try, tragically and beautifully, to become more intelligent than the loudest person in the room. Meetings decide what gets noticed, who gets heard, how disagreement moves, where memory lives, when action happens, and whether a group becomes wiser or merely more tired.

This workshop is about collective intelligence: ants making bridges out of their own bodies, jazz bands landing together without a conductor, Wikipedia accreting knowledge through millions of tiny edits, communities organising before anyone has found the right job title. Something is thinking, but no one is in charge. We'll move from meetings to collective intelligence systems: facilitation, cybernetics, Project Cybersyn, Decidim, public AI, democracy tools, food systems and distributed reasoning.

Participants will play with prototypes I've developed and tested in the wild: tools used by Tswana farmers in South Africa to coordinate themselves, systems shown at the Venice Biennale, and EU-funded prototypes for organisational decision-making. Then we'll use them as semi-feral research objects to design collective intelligence loops for real problems participants care about.