I see online social networks, such as 43things.com, as playgrounds where our toddler collective intelligence (CI) is crawling around and slowly getting ready to stand on its feet and learn walking. Raising that child will ask for all of us, and those already engaged in it are receiving its early gifts. I am one of those lucky ones because I’ve been a “professional CI babysitter” since 1982, the year when I started studying, participating in, and facilitating online communities. (The boldface quote is from my online workshop on Boosting the Collective Intelligence of Your Network.)

My current passion is to facilitate a transformative shift in the effectiveness of change champions and their communities in and across organizations. I pursue it by coaching, giving workshops, consulting, blogging, and currently, designing a new kind of online university. In my work, I combine European values, American dynamism, ancient wisdom traditions, and emerging social media.

My academic posts included: Université de Paris, California Institute of Integral Studies, UC Berkeley, and more recently, Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD, and Visiting Researcher in the Complexity Programme of the London School of Economics. In 2002, I founded CommunityIntelligence, an organizational transformation agency and network of change facilitators. I authored The Quest for Collective Intelligence, a chapter on Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice, and chapters on communities of practice and collective intelligence in the forthcoming book on Evolutionary Leadership by Peter Merry. I speak English, French, Hungarian, Russian, and very beginner Dutch. My slightly outdated professional bio is here.