Collective Intelligences: Collaborating through Distributed Systems
Date & Time: Thursday, September 18, 11:00–12:30 EEST
Location: Lumituuli Auditorium, Dipoli, Aalto University
Overview
Intelligence doesn’t just belong to individuals—it emerges through connection, communities, and collaborative processes. The presentations in this session demonstrate why and how to leverage collective intelligence to design responsive systems and AI solutions that amplify rather than fragment collaboration.
Session Leader: Martin Ortlieb, User Experience Researcher, Google
Presentations
Collective Intelligence Online: An Ecological Framework for AI and Community Moderation
Ariel Abonizio, Manager, ReD Associates
Beth Goldberg, Head of Research & Development, Jigsaw (Google)
Emily Saltz, Senior UX Researcher, Jigsaw (Google)
Katy Osborn, Associate Partner, ReD Associates
Millie Arora, Partner, ReD Associates
Drawing on research across 13 communities on Reddit, Discord, Slack, Mastodon, and BlueSky – from local groups to large-scale forums – we offer three practical contributions for researchers studying group dynamics in digital spaces: (1) a suite of ethnographic exercises that reveal how groups collaborate, make decisions, and maintain collective knowledge; (2) strategies for co-creation involving product teams and research participants to strengthen analysis and impact; and (3) frameworks for how AI can augment existing social decision-making practices, demonstrated through our analysis of how moderators maintain institutional knowledge, distribute expertise, and evolve community norms. Our approach moves beyond traditional user research focused on individuals to capture how healthy communities emerge from interactions between moderators, members, and moderation tools. These approaches serve researchers studying how AI can support rather than supplant group practices. Research Case Study
Presenters & Authors
Ariel Abonizio is an anthropologist, artist, and business strategist who specializes in advising global technology companies on product and corporate strategy from inception to implementation. At ReD Associates, Ariel uses ethnographic research to inform product, engineering and business leaders on how to design for thorny human concepts like trust, privacy, misinformation, cultural representation, and intimacy.
Beth Goldberg leads an interdisciplinary team of Google researchers and designers at Jigsaw, a Google unit that gives people agency over what comes next. Her team investigates and builds cutting edge technologies for the hardest civic challenges alongside academics, civil society, and technologists. Beth is also a lecturer at Yale Graduate School of Global Affairs on Disinformation & AI.
Emily Saltz is a Senior UX Researcher at Jigsaw, a Google unit that gives people agency over what comes next. Previously, she was a UX Researcher at the NYT R&D Lab, and a Fellow at Partnership on AI. She has a Master’s in HCI from Carnegie Mellon.
Katy Osborn, Associate Partner, ReD Associates
Millie Arora, Partner, ReD Associates
'Building the Loop': Automations in Ethnography and Organizational Legibility
Ellie Rennie, Professor, RMIT University
Kelsie Nabben, Research Fellow, RMIT University
Matthew Green, Research Assistant, RMIT University
Michael Zargham, Chief Engineer, BlockScience
An organization’s boundaries are defined by how specialized knowledge flows and is shared – a task that open or distributed organisational networks struggle with due to their lack of centralized, hierarchical memory structures. This paper presents our experiments with Knowledge Organization Infrastructure (KOI), a decentralized protocol developed by BlockScience for referencing, sharing, and governing knowledge without exposing sensitive information. Using a consent bot and KOI plugin that we constructed, we show: (1) how some ethnographic practices themselves can be automated to enhance ethics and participation with human and machine agents, and (2) how ethnographers and communities can together set rules, encode context, and guide AI agents to actively shape ‘artificial organizational intelligence,’ even in distributed, local-first, and other loosely structured organizational contexts. Paper
Presenters & Authors
Ellie Rennie is an Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and a Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University. Her research is examining permissionless systems and on-chain communities using ethnographic methods, including validator governance, contribution systems and infrastructures for the collective governance of knowledge.
Kelsie Nabben is an ethnographic researcher specialising in the social impacts of emerging technologies, particularly decentralised digital infrastructure (including blockchains, peer-to-peer protocols, and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) and other algorithmic systems (such as Large-Language-Models).
Matthew Green, Research Assistant, RMIT University
Michael Zargham is the founder and CEO of BlockScience. Dr. Zargham holds a Ph.D. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied optimization and control of decentralized networks. Dr. Zargham has designed data driven decision systems and built a data science team for a Media Technology firm, worked on the mathematical specifications of blockchain enabled software systems with a focus on observability and controllability of the information state of the networks.
The Intelligence of Those Living on the Margins
Tibor Zoltán Dányi, Assistant Professor, Co-founder of Research Group for Solidarity in Architecture, University of Pécs
As an architect, I wanted to know more about the builders whom architects know almost nothing about. People who are homeless, living on the margins of Hungarian society and at the edge of formal cities, construct homes without having studied local building regulations, statics, or construction and without paying for the services of an architect or raw materials. This PechaKucha explores how they build with intelligences that are material, ecological, and empowering, and what architects, designers, and policymakers can learn from them. PechaKucha
Between Trash and Treasure: Archiving Anonymous Exchange in a New York City Apartment Building
What do a carton of expiring eggs, an empty fish tank, and a wooden mermaid reveal about a community? This talk presents a visual ethnography of the items left in an unorganized “giveaway pile” where neighbors discreetly discard unwanted items, ranging from ordinary to bizarre. Drawing from an archive of over 100 objects photographed across six years, it explores how collective intelligence emerges through shared spaces and an unspoken understanding of what might be valuable. PechaKucha
Presenter & Author
Theo Shure is a design researcher and visual artist with over a decade of experience applying mixed-methods research across industries. As Lead Researcher at Squarespace, she explores the lives of small business owners, entrepreneurs, and artists – bringing empathy and depth to product development. Her artistic practice reflects the same ethnographic and durational sensibility – spanning video, photography, and drawing to capture patterns of people and places over time.