  This volume holds the proceedings of the Collective Intelligence 2012
conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It contains the full papers, poster
papers, and plenary abstracts.
  Collective intelligence has existed at least as long as humans have, because
families, armies, countries, and companies have all - at least sometimes -
acted collectively in ways that seem intelligent. But in the last decade or so
a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: groups of people and
computers, connected by the Internet, collectively doing intelligent things.
For example, Google technology harvests knowledge generated by millions of
people creating and linking web pages and then uses this knowledge to answer
queries in ways that often seem amazingly intelligent. Or in Wikipedia,
thousands of people around the world have collectively created a very large and
high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control, and
almost all as volunteers! These early examples of Internet-enabled collective
intelligence are not the end of the story but just the beginning. And in order
to understand the possibilities and constraints of these new kinds of
intelligence, we need a new interdisciplinary field.
