Editorial to the Inaugural Issue of Collective Intelligence

Collective behavior is a universal property of biological, social, and many engineered systems. However, the study of collective intelligence—roughly, the production of adaptive, wise, or clever structures and behaviors by groups— remains nascent. Despite that, it is growing in various disciplines, from biology and psychology to computer science and economics, management, and political science to mathematics, complexity science, and neuroscience. With the launch of Collective Intelligence, we aim to create a publication that transcends disciplines, methodologies, and traditional formats. We hope to help discover principles that can be useful to both basic and applied science and encourage the emergence of a unified discipline of study. Collective Intelligence (the Journal) is a global, peerreviewed, open-access journal. It will feature research articles, perspectives, dialogues, and artistic expressions, all geared toward a community of scholars in many disciplines. In this editorial, we highlight issues in collective intelligence research where attention will aid in discovering principles, concepts, and tools needed to unify the discipline. We proceed with a light hand, guided by recognizing that our role is to facilitate deep, provocative analyses and discussions rather than to define and, therefore, delimit the field.