JILL NEPHEW was almost invited to the Respond event (to generate a preliminary "wisdom curriculum") at the Monastic Academy.  Almost.  Her status in the liminal community is oddly, well... liminal. 

There's a bit of a mystery when it comes to Jill and her contribution to the field.  Maybe she's subtly offputting?  Or maybe not.  Are there people opposed to her work combining "natural intelligence" with social dynamics and software engineering?  Is it too hard to understand the way she languages the relationship between psychotechnologies, information processing and the scientific logic of error correction?  Too difficult to evaluate? 

What cannot be denied however -- and what deserves a lot more of our collective attention -- is that any attempt to "scale up" the promulgation of wisdom-culture is going to require new tools.  Tools that are easy to use and easy to distribute through digital networks.  Tools that accelerate self-processing and self-unfolding in a safe manner.  And that's very much what Jill is trying to implement. 

The Inqwire app is designed to be very simple and very complex at the same time.  Utilizing her research on basic human grammars, it prompts users for unresolved issues and guides them through imaginative counterfactual scenarios until resolution and insight are regained.  It can be surprisingly effective.  It also exemplifies a particular theory about how our natural intelligence optimizes our personal and collective navigation over a multi-perspectival landscape using the salience of problems.

Her forthcoming book, and her recent multiple appearances on the Stoa and the Integral Stage, point to a still-emerging perspective that is both deeply intriguing and, for some people, offputting in its very strong claims about what will (and will not) pragmatically work for the scaling up of wisdom-civilization.  On the other hand -- maybe she's right. 

Bold?  Sure.  Perfect interface?  No.  Worth checking out?  Definitely.

The emergence community is going to have to start having a much deeper conversation about apps...