Shiver

Solutions for Community Intelligence

Intellectual Property, Functionality, Content, etc – these creations belong to the communities that cultivate them. We are invested in creating technical solutions that allow our digital communities to reclaim our own creations.

In an industry over-saturated with cheap, exploitative AI solutions, we realized that it is not just a challenge to do something different—it’s a necessity.

Internet, in the age of generative AI, has accelerated:

Misinformation
Loss of knowledge
Disruption of community spaces
Intensification of conflict
Commodification of art
Income inequality
Job instability
Negative self-image

And so much more. These issues are, of course, not solely due to the proliferation of AI, but the current usage of AI in the industry has undeniably worsened them. This has had wide-ranging effects on the world from home life to the workplace to geopolitics, and even the environment. It is easy to fall into the trap of interpreting the push-back to the industry’s current obsession with AI as a “mere” social justice issue, but you can also see its negative impacts on business. More likely than not, you’ve heard or seen that your company has issues with:

Knowledge transfer
Team cohesion
Engagement
Silo mentality

Substituting AI for human-centric solutions exacerbates these issues. It is tempting to see it as a work-around for loss of knowledge, but it can’t create what your organization lacks, and using it in this way disincentivizes teams from capturing information. Even worse, the misinformation that it can (and often does) produce when improperly applied poisons the well. People will start repeating the inefficient or improper solutions that AI suggests.

Blue Shark Friends is staking its success on the idea that it is not Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) that will transform the tech industry, but Community Intelligence (C.I.). We believe that the Internet’s greatest strength is its ability to unite diverse people across any distance. What attracted people to social media, video sharing platforms, and other content sharing sites was not their ability to provide an endless stream of content, but access to people beyond physical barriers. Your next-door neighbors might not care or know anything about your hobby or a unique issue your facing, but someone out there does, and the Internet has the potential to make them a lot more accessible.

What is community intelligence? It is a strategy of re-centering application development around building community. Blue Shark Friends’s members bring over a decade of experience in community organizing and software engineering to tackle this problem. We are starting first with building our own digital community and capturing the methodology we use to do this for others to replicate and help shape it. Along the way, we are building software applications to facilitate this process. We hope others find our tools useful, but whether you use Shiver or create your own Community Intelligence (C.I.) solution, we hope you join us in this movement.

Ultimately, AI is a tool, and it is not always the wrong tool, but it has become a buzzword (not just in the tech industry but in the business world at large) that is championed as a quick fix for diverse issues that it cannot solve alone, especially not without careful application. When we assert that AI is causing harm, this is what we’re talking about. This pervasive strategy to replace people with one-size-fits-all bots. We are fighting this “artificial intelligence” with community intelligence, and we are going to win.