Blog | Relaia

Community Intelligence is the concept-umbrella by which we define a holistic approach to the development of digital ecosystems on territories, where collective and digital intelligence can coexist with a view to local autonomy, federation and collaboration. It is not just about implementing technologies, but about creating an ecosystem where data and algorithms serve the community, innovatively supporting solutions to problems, respecting peculiarities and enhancing local cultural and infrastructural resources.

With the establishment of the information society and the internet, increasingly inhabited by artificial intelligence systems, it's time to look at the present and future with new eyes, in a perspective of rethinking and reappropriation of digital by those who use it, especially in the interest of territories and communities. We believe it's possible to create value starting from a new way of interacting with the infosphere and algorithms that have been and are certainly engines of progress, but also of many undesired effects and often not to the advantage of most, or even more simply, not yet directed towards the common good.

Some definitions

• data are resources deeply integrated with the processes that generate, measure, and process them
• algorithms – including those associated with artificial intelligence – are sequences of repeatable operations that process information, often part of distributed and complex systems, endowed with materiality and agency*

By community intelligence we mean a very broad spectrum of practices and processes that allow the relationship between cultural contexts, the community that lives them, knowledge, and practices of its production to emerge. We think it's useful to go beyond the concept of collective intelligence (often inherent to the mere social and human dimension of phenomena), and overcome those early definitions that associated social networks and a series of purely extractive practices with the meaning of community intelligence.

Our principles

Security

If a good part of our existence includes digital, then the defense of this space becomes crucial for our autonomy, culture, and ability to choose, to direct policies and imagine futures. For this reason, an adequate threshold of security in the measures we adopt is necessary, as well as protection for common goods such as data and the algorithms that process them. Security also implies control and the possibility to look inside the box, which can no longer remain closed or inspectable by only a few.

Justice

When we talk about technologies for territorial governance and meaning-making, no one should suffer the effects of the application of processes and technologies that segregate, marginalize, exclude, or that produce benefits only for those who own or produce the technology.

Sustainability

We must take care of digital infrastructures like all others, that is, seeking performance while tending to nullify the impact on the environment and on anyone who suffers its repercussions, anywhere and of any kind.

Participation

Nature teaches us that well-functioning organisms or communities of individuals are based on the contribution of all their members, which is why we believe that an important direction of work for digital is to improve coordination between individuals, between information, desires, instances, and decisions. It doesn't mean overcoming democracy, but defending it from technologies and mechanisms that can undermine its health, and that today are responsible for dangerous deformations or, at best, don't allow us to unleash innovative potential.

Ethics

We must look at intelligence systems, across the spectrum of their biological, artificial, and emerging components of any nature, with a vigilant and critical eye, aware that by entering into processes, materiality, and rituals, they will have an impact on culture, politics, and the health status of the balance of powers.

Today, no one is able to predict with scientific certainty or even with an adequate level of confidence what will happen in the future and what capabilities systems of machines with human and non-human actors will be able to bring forth. However, we know that we can design preferable future scenarios and tend towards them, just as technologies and their functioning should always be within the boundaries of what is desirable. This is why we can act.

Relaia was born with the aim of focusing the potential of the digital era to support community intelligence, to enable effective and local solutions to the great problems of our time, providing secure, resilient, sustainable solutions that respect territorial specificities.

* no, artificial intelligence systems do not possess will, have no objectives, nor the ability to feel emotions or feelings. They are tools that execute instructions, no matter how complex they may be.