What happens when communities, researchers, artists and technology help shape decisions together? We’re exploring the possibilities this fall.

In our first article, we introduced Scrambled Research as something we’re experimenting with this fall: a way of doing research that doesn’t cram everyone into neat institutional boxes. Students, researchers, community members, artists, organizations and institutions can have different roles at different times, and those roles can overlap. We’re interested in seeing what becomes possible when we work with that reality instead of trying to tidy it away.

So, the next question is pretty obvious: if we’re going to experiment with how arts and research programs work, can we also experiment with how these networks make decisions? And that’s where cognified governance comes into the mix.

But wait – what’s cognification? Good question! A cognified model is really just a way of helping a group think and work with all the knowledge it has. That could involve things like AI, data, maps, visualizations or other tools, but technology isn’t the main point. The idea is to help people connect information, spot patterns, remember what happened before and make better decisions together. It’s not about AI making the decisions. It’s about giving people, projets and communities better ways to see what they know and use it.

A consortium is a group. Researchers and universities like those kind of words because it sounds extra fancy.

We’re exploring the idea of a Cognified Consortium as a way of bringing these pieces together. We’re totally not interested in building another big organization with a giant committee structure and a stack of acronyms no one understands. There’s way too much of that these days. The idea we want to explore is much simpler. A small community or program shouldn’t have to build every kind of expertise it might ever need. It should connect to people, organizations, researchers, artists, technologies, funding sources and other communities that already have some of that knowledge and capacity.

For our program, that could mean something that’s really quite practical. Local people know the landscape, the history, the community and the things that are actually happening on the ground. Someone else in the network might know GIS. Another person might know food production. Someone else might be working in AI. Maybe what we need is a better way to connect.

That’s part of what we mean by cognified. We’re not talking about putting AI in charge of anything either, though we love using it. We’re interested in whether technology can help a group of people become better at thinking together. There is already a huge amount of knowledge scattered across communities and institutions. Much of it never meets. Some of it sits in reports. Some sits in databases. Some is in someone’s head.

We want to explore what happens when those things can be connected. And scrambled up, like scrambled eggs. With bacon. Did we mention a lot of our meetings often happen during breakfast? A lot of this came from talking around the table during a breakfast.

The governance question gets interesting very quickly. If useful knowledge can come from all over a network, does the person with the most institutional authority always need to make the decision? Probably not. The world doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes a community knows the most. Sometimes a researcher does. Sometimes an artist sees something everyone else has missed. Sometimes the person who has actually built the thing has the best answer.

We’re interested in governance that can recognize those differences without pretending that everyone has to have the same authority all the time.

And then there are the arts, which make the whole thing a lot more interesting. It’s gotta be creative.

We don’t want to tack an arts project onto the end of a research project and call it engagement. There’s already way too much of that. Artistic practice can help us understand the system we’re building. We can map relationships, make networks visible, turn data into physical or visual work, tell stories about how decisions get made, build prototypes, make things that are deliberately strange, or simply use creative practice to ask a question that doesn’t fit comfortably into a report.

Sometimes a diagram explains something. Sometimes a sculpture does. Sometimes you need both.

We’re also interested in what happens when the consortium develops a memory. Like we mentioned in the first article, research projects end, students graduate and people move between organizations, but that doesn’t mean everything has to disappear with them. The research, relationships, creative work, experiments, data and lessons can become part of what comes next. Someone joining the network later should be able to find the trail of what happened before them, including the things that didn’t work.

So this fall, we’re putting a few ideas into the same experiment. Scrambled Research gives us a way to rethink the usual research roles. Cognified governance gives us a way to explore how decisions might work when knowledge is spread across a network. And the arts give us another way to see what we’re actually building.

We don’t know exactly what we’re doing yet, and that’s intentional. We’re interested in trying things, making things, connecting people, seeing what works and paying attention when something doesn’t. There will probably be some unexpected combinations along the way.

But that’s the fun of this particular experiment. We’re don’t want to make arts and research tidy. We want to see what happens when we give it a little more room to move in new and curiously unexpected ways.