The Term
Like the term social capital, civic intelligence has been used independently by several people since the beginning of the 20th century. Although there has been little or no direct contact between the various authors, the different meanings associated with the term are generally complementary to each other.
The first usage identified was made in 1902 by Samuel T. Dutton, Superintendent of Teachers College Schools on the occasion of the dedication of the Horace Mann School when it noted that "increasing civic intelligence" is a "true purpose of education in this country." More recently, in 1985, David Matthews, president of the Kettering Foundation, wrote an article entitled Civic Intelligence in which he discussed the decline of civic engagement in the United States.
A still more recent version is Douglas Schuler's "Cultivating Society's Civic Intelligence: Patterns for a New 'World Brain'". In Schuler's version, civic intelligence is applied to groups of people because that is the level where public opinion is formed and decisions are made or at least influenced. It applies to groups, formal or informal, who are working towards civic goals such as environmental amelioration or non-violence among people. This version is related to many other concepts that are currently receiving a great deal of attention including collective intelligence, distributed intelligence, participatory democracy, emergence, new social movements, collaborative problem-solving, and Web 2.0.
Read more about this topic: Civic Intelligence
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