  Human groups of all sizes and kinds engage in deliberation, problem solving,
strategizing, decision making, and more generally, cognition. Some groups are
large, and that setting presents unique challenges. The small-group setting
often involves face-to-face dialogue, but group cognition in the large-group
setting typically requires some form of online interaction. New approaches are
needed to facilitate the kind of rich communication and information processing
that are required for effective, functional cognition in the online setting,
especially for groups characterized by thousands to millions of participants
who wish to share potentially complex, nuanced, and dynamic perspectives. This
concept paper proposes the CogNarr (Cognitive Narrative) ecosystem, which is
designed to facilitate functional cognition in the large-group setting. The
paper's contribution is a novel vision as to how recent developments in
cognitive science, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and
related fields might be scaled and applied to large-group cognition, using an
approach that itself promotes further scientific advancement. A key perspective
is to view a group as an organism that uses some form of cognitive architecture
to sense the world, process information, remember, learn, predict, make
decisions, and adapt to changing conditions. The CogNarr ecosystem is designed
to serve as a component within that architecture.
