Title:  About mmowgli

Author: Garth Jensen

Abstract: mmowgli is both the coolest project I have ever worked on, and the hardest to describe in words, but I’ll try to do so here. If I had to do it in one sentence, I’d say that mmowgli is an experiment in generating collective intelligence.  If I had another sentence, I would add that it is a pilot project being developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). 

But beyond that, mmowgli is ultimately the answer to a question……a question that haunted me every day during my tour as a Science Advisor: why did I experience such a disconnect between technologists and “innovators”, on the one hand, and warfighters and end users on the other? Why didn’t “game changing innovations” generate more enthusiasm from those who were “in the game”? And what was I doing to make it better?

As my Pentagon tour drew to a close, this question nagged at me and morphed into a thousand others: What if we took a heavy, formal approach, and made it lighter…….more of a continuous conversation instead of a blueprint? What if you didn’t need a fully formed idea to make a contribution? What if ideas, even half-formed ones, could meet up in space and recombine with other ideas to form new ones? What if this conversation engaged more stakeholders, and tolerated more excursions? Finally, what if this conversation became so rich and compelling that, instead of truncating the debate, it actually enlarged the universe of possibilities?

During my talk I will expand on the goals and vision of mmowgli, engage the audience in a discussion of how it might be re-purposed, and give some preliminary assessments of what we accomplished in our first instantiation of the game.

Last Updated: 26 July 2011