Collaborative Sensemaking — A Landscape
Under the broad umbrella of collaborative sensemaking, a dozen-plus terms keep getting used as if they were synonyms. They aren't. They sit on different axes, come out of different traditions, and answer different questions. This document organizes them, then shows where The Big Fungus sits in relation to the field.
A quick orienting note: these terms vary along at least four axes that matter.
- Scale — dyad, small group, organization, society, species.
- Substrate — purely human, human plus tool, human plus AI, or networked humans as substrate.
- Mechanism — aggregation (averaging independent views), emergence (something arising that no individual holds), or augmentation (extending a single mind outward).
- Stance — descriptive (this is what's happening) versus aspirational (this is what we should build).
With those axes in mind, the terms cluster into five lily pads.
Cluster 1 — The Extended Mind family (the foundation)
Cognition spills outside the skull.
Extended Mind / Extended Mind Hypothesis (Andy Clark and David Chalmers, 1998) is the philosophical anchor. When a notebook, a phone, or Jerry's Brain functions reliably as part of your cognitive process, it is part of your mind, not just a tool your mind uses. The unit of cognition is person-plus-environment.
Extelligence (Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 1997) is the sibling concept from a different angle — the externalized, cumulative store of human knowledge (libraries, the internet, institutions) that any individual mind dips into. Where Extended Mind is about one person's cognitive coupling with their tools, extelligence is about the civilizational reservoir those tools connect to.
These two are the load-bearing concept underneath everything else. Once you accept that cognition extends outward, collective cognition stops being metaphorical. Every cluster above this one quietly presumes the Extended Mind premise.
Cluster 2 — Small-group magic (the room is smarter than anyone in it)
Emergence in sustained interaction.
Group Genius (Keith Sawyer, 2007) is the academic articulation — improvisational, conversational creativity where the breakthrough belongs to the interaction, not any participant.
Scenius (Brian Eno, articulated in his diaries and talks from the 1990s onward) is the same phenomenon at scene-scale. The Velvet Underground, the Bauhaus, early Silicon Valley. A fertile ecology of mutually-stimulating peers produces work no member could have produced alone. "Scenius" is Eno's deliberate counter to the lone-genius myth.
Thought Collectives (Ludwik Fleck, 1935 — predating Kuhn and influencing him) belongs near this cluster but tilts more sociological. A Denkkollektiv is a community sharing a Denkstil (thought-style) that shapes what its members can even perceive as a fact. Scientific paradigms are the canonical example. Less about creative spark, more about shared cognitive frame.
The unifying intuition: small-to-medium groups, sustained interaction, emergence of something the individuals didn't bring in.
Cluster 3 — The aggregation tradition (many minds, structured)
Intelligence as something you can aggregate, measure, and improve through process design.
Collective Intelligence is the umbrella academic term — Pierre Lévy, Tom Malone's MIT center, Geoff Mulgan's recent book. Tends to mean: how do you get groups (often large, often distributed) to produce better outputs than individuals? Includes wisdom-of-crowds, prediction markets, Wikipedia, citizen science.
Large-Scale Collective IQ is Doug Engelbart's specific version. He meant it as a measurable capacity of an organization or society to confront complex problems, and his whole bootstrapping project (NLS, the Mother of All Demos) was aimed at raising it through better tools. More engineering-minded, more aspirational than descriptive.
Better Collaborative Decisions is the applied/operational end of this same line — less a theory, more a goal. Deliberation design, structured dialogue, decision protocols, citizens' assemblies.
The shared logic: combine independent judgments through good process and you get something more reliable than any individual judgment.
Cluster 4 — The superorganism family (one mind, many bodies)
The collective as a unified cognitive entity.
Noosphere (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1922, developed with Vernadsky and Le Roy) is the ancestor of this whole cluster. A thinking layer wrapping the planet, successor to the biosphere, evolving toward what Teilhard called the Omega Point. Mystical-evolutionary.
Global Brain (Francis Heylighen and the Global Brain Institute, late 20th century onward) is Teilhard refracted through cybernetics. Humanity plus its communications infrastructure as a planetary-scale nervous system, with the internet as the emerging neural substrate. The lineage from Noosphere is direct; the rhetoric is technical instead of mystical.
Hive Mind is the older biological metaphor, often used loosely or pejoratively. Implies loss of individual judgment in the name of collective coherence.
Superintelligence sits adjacent but pulls in a different direction. In Bostrom's sense it usually means a single artificial system exceeding human cognition. But it gets used loosely for any sufficiently capable collective-or-AI cognition. The key tension worth flagging: superintelligence discourse often replaces human cognition; global brain discourse networks it.
The cluster lineage: mystical → cybernetic → AI-centric.
Cluster 5 — Human plus AI hybrid (the contemporary frontier)
Non-human intelligences enter the room.
Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) explicitly mixes humans and AI agents as peers in a sensemaking process. The "hybrid" is the load-bearing word — neither pure human collective intelligence nor pure machine intelligence, but the interaction.
Multiplayer Sensemaking (term has currency in the Jim Rutt / Game B / Daniel Schmachtenberger orbit) overlaps heavily but emphasizes the process — multiple agents (human or otherwise) jointly making sense of a complex situation in real time, often with explicit attention to perspective-taking and synthesis.
These two are the most contemporary, and they're where SJB and Big Fungus actually live. Notice they both presume the Extended Mind premise.
How the clusters connect
The cleanest through-line:
Extended Mind and Extelligence (Cluster 1) are the premise. Once cognition can extend outward, the question becomes how does it scale and combine? Cluster 2 (Group Genius, Scenius, Thought Collectives) answers at small-group scale through emergence. Cluster 3 (Collective Intelligence, Engelbart's Collective IQ) answers at large-group scale through aggregation and tool-design. Cluster 4 (Noosphere, Global Brain, Hive Mind, Superintelligence) takes the limit and asks what happens when the collective becomes a unified cognitive entity. Cluster 5 (CHI, Multiplayer Sensemaking) is where the question gets re-asked once non-human intelligences enter the room.
Three cross-cutting tensions worth carrying forward:
Aggregation versus emergence. Cluster 3 mostly assumes you're combining existing judgments. Cluster 2 assumes something genuinely new arises in the interaction. Most real collaborative sensemaking does both, but theorists tend to camp on one side.
Human-centric versus substrate-agnostic. Group Genius, Scenius, Thought Collectives are unapologetically about humans. Global Brain, Superintelligence, CHI are happy to dissolve that boundary. Collective Intelligence straddles.
Descriptive versus aspirational. Thought Collectives, Extended Mind, Scenius mostly describe what already happens. Engelbart's Collective IQ, CHI, Better Collaborative Decisions mostly prescribe what we should build. Worth knowing which mode a writer is in.
Where The Big Fungus fits
The Big Fungus is the practical project that this whole landscape has been pointing toward without quite arriving at.
The premise. People (and now AIs) are already externalizing their thinking. Jerry's Brain has done it associatively in TheBrain for nearly thirty years. Roam users do it with bidirectional links. Obsidian vaults grow in private and occasionally surface. Wikis, zettelkasten, mind maps, concept maps, ontologies, knowledge graphs — every shop has its own representational scheme, and almost none of them talk to each other. The Extended Mind premise has been broadly accepted in practice, but the extended minds don't interconnect.
The gap. Cluster 3 (Collective Intelligence, Engelbart) imagined the bootstrapping but assumed everyone would converge on shared tools. They haven't and won't. Cluster 4 (Global Brain) imagined the planetary nervous system but doesn't specify what the synapses look like at the level where actual thinking happens. Cluster 5 (CHI, Multiplayer Sensemaking) names the human-plus-AI mix but mostly describes it inside a single conversation or session, not across years of accumulated thought across millions of people. Nothing in the existing vocabulary really names what happens when the extended minds of many people, built in incompatible tools, can meet each other and leave each other better.
The Big Fungus is that meeting layer. An open knowledge commons where people using different thinking tools — TheBrain, Obsidian, Roam, Notion, plain Markdown, hand-drawn lily-pad diagrams — can:
- compare notes across representational schemes without forcing convergence on one tool
- debate ideas with the receipts (the underlying maps, the trails of thought) visible
- set up experiments — small, falsifiable, observable — and pool the results
- act as a credible substrate for collective decision-making at scales where institutions currently fail us
The mycelial metaphor is the point. A fungus doesn't ask plants to become fungi. It connects them underground, carrying nutrients and signals between species that would otherwise compete or ignore each other. Different roots, shared network.
How it relates to the existing clusters.
- Built on Cluster 1. Without the Extended Mind premise the project is incoherent. The maps people externalize are their thinking, not records of their thinking.
- Realizes the dream of Cluster 3 at a higher fidelity than the aggregation tradition has managed. Engelbart wanted to bootstrap collective IQ. Big Fungus says: stop trying to get everyone on NLS. Let the schemes proliferate, build the substrate that lets them meet.
- Provides the synapses Cluster 4 hand-waves. Global Brain discourse is rarely concrete about the cognitive units being networked. Big Fungus says: the units are externalized thought-maps belonging to identifiable people (and AIs) who can be accountable for them.
- Operationalizes Cluster 5. Multiplayer Sensemaking and CHI become tractable when the players have persistent, comparable maps they bring to the table. Big Fungus is the table.
Why now. Three things have changed:
- Capable AIs can now read and reason across heterogeneous knowledge representations — TheBrain, Obsidian, plain text, Mermaid diagrams, Excalidraw drawings — without requiring schema harmonization upfront.
- Long-haul externalizers (Jerry, a small but growing tribe of people who have made their thinking public for decades) provide proof-of-concept that this is sustainable and valuable. SJB's "Human Provenance" frame names what they offer: not answers, but specific accountable judgment over time.
- Institutional sensemaking is visibly failing at the scales that matter. The need for a credible alternative substrate is felt, not theoretical.
Where this sits in the nested project structure.
Embiggenment (the largest personal/relational frame with April) ⊃ Next Stacks (identifying high-functioning societal elements so contagious they displace dysfunctional ones) ⊃ Big Fungus (the open commons described here) ⊃ Brain Legacy / JerrysBrainBot (the LLM-with-Brain-as-context that demonstrates the principle at the scale of one externalized mind).
SJB is the near-term revenue engine that funds the whole stack. Every successful SJB session is also a public demonstration of why externalized, accountable thinking matters — which is the recruiting pitch for Big Fungus.
A short glossary for quick reference
| Term | Cluster | Mechanism | Stance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extended Mind | 1 | Augmentation | Descriptive |
| Extelligence | 1 | Augmentation | Descriptive |
| Group Genius | 2 | Emergence | Descriptive |
| Scenius | 2 | Emergence | Descriptive |
| Thought Collectives | 2 | Emergence | Descriptive |
| Collective Intelligence | 3 | Aggregation | Mixed |
| Large-Scale Collective IQ | 3 | Aggregation | Aspirational |
| Better Collaborative Decisions | 3 | Aggregation | Aspirational |
| Noosphere | 4 | Emergence at planetary scale | Aspirational/mystical |
| Global Brain | 4 | Networked aggregation | Aspirational |
| Hive Mind | 4 | Substrate-level coherence | Descriptive (often pejorative) |
| Superintelligence | 4 | Single-system or hybrid | Aspirational/cautionary |
| Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence | 5 | Human + AI interaction | Aspirational |
| Multiplayer Sensemaking | 5 | Process-oriented emergence | Aspirational |
| Big Fungus | bridges 1, 3, 4, 5 | Substrate that lets heterogeneous extended minds meet | Aspirational, practical |
Companion diagrams in this vault
CollaborativeSensemaking_LilyPad.excalidraw.md— the five-cluster conceptual map (the version closest to Jerry's hand-drawn lily-pad)CollaborativeSensemaking_LayeredStack.excalidraw.md— same content, organized by scale (foundation to planetary, with hybrid as a sidecar)Visions_Genealogy.excalidraw.md— the visions lineage from Indra's Net to Scenius, with Noosphere as the bridge to the modern era