Happiness and the Collective Mind

Welcome to the MIT/University of Cologne/University of Bamberg/Jilin University Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs2018) seminar!

Overview

This seminar shows how to measure happiness and creativity through analyzing collective consciousness within organizations and on the Internet, using social media analysis. It combines latest insights from happiness research with social media monitoring, machine learning, and big data. You will learn about general principles of happiness in the context of positive psychology and behavioral economics. The seminar also introduces the concept of “coolhunting” in three information spheres, the crowd – mostly found on Twitter, the experts – found on blogs and Web sites, and the swarm – on Wikipedia and in online forums. It also shows how to do “coolfarming”, tracking and supporting the creation of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) by analyzing e-mail and other communication archives and providing a mirror of their communication patterns to users. The goal is to improve communication, leading to better collaboration, leading to more innovation, helping you to understand how to lead a happier and more meaningful life.

The degree of collaboration can be measured through seven honest signals of collaboration: strong leadership, balanced contribution, rotating leadership, responsiveness, honest sentiment, shared context, and social capital. The seminar explains how to implement these concepts using the software tool Condor and the Happimeter, developed by our team at MIT, U. Cologne, and U. Bamberg. Condor calculates the seven honest signals of collaboration, tracking the degree of collective consciousness face-to-face with the happimeter, on online social media such as Twitter, blogs, or Facebook, or corporate e-mail, calendar, and skype archives using dynamic semantic social network analysis and machine learning. The Happimeter is a smartwatch based sensor that measures emotions based on the body signals of the wearer.

The course is based on the two new books by Peter Gloor

• Swarm Leadership and the Collective Mind: Using Collaborative Innovation Networks to Build a Better Business , Emerald Publishing, London, 2017
• Sociometrics and Human Relationships: Analyzing Social Networks to Manage Brands, Predict Trends, and Improve Organizational Performance , Emerald Publishing, London 2017