Climate commons was intended always to be a short term experiment with two primary goals. First to bring together researchers/thinkers/producers from a wide range of fields to contribute information/ideas to a multidisciplinary pool. Henry Jenkin’s writes about this in his blog: “In a networked society, people are increasingly forming Knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.”

The second was to create on the internet in a blog form a space for conversation, questions, and contributions from anyone–a participatory network. As I contemplate what happened in the more than one hundred posts and three hundred comments with the site visited by an average of 3000 people a day, a number of new questions have formed:

what is the nature of participation on the internet?

Tim O’Reilly has a recent post about energy issues making it onto what he calls the “alpha geek radar”. I think another way of saying this might be that more and more people are having conversations like ours. He says, “It’s really interesting the way ideas spread and catch on, and suddenly get on everyone’s radar at the same time. It makes me think of Danny Hillis’ definition of global intelligence: ‘It’s that which decided that decaf coffeepots should be orange.’”