I agree with punkarsenic, that system seems to make sense.
Looks like we're doing a sci-fi story with maybe some fantasy elements.
Shall we start suggesting specific story ideas? I'd like to open this to anyone reading in this thread.
hmm... maybe smth subverting the alien invasion trope? i think it would be interesting to explore a society where aliens have invaded, and live side-by-side with the native inhabitants, and the tensions that arise there, inspired by situations in real life. that said, itd be a touchy topic.
maybe if everyone listed some of their favourite pieces of scifi work, and stuff we wanna reference of any genre, we could build up a good idea of where to go from that?
Earth: Final Conflict1 was my jam. I'm also a big Star Trek fan. My favorite scifi movie is Predator and my favorite scifi game is Homeworld.
I just had to vote! I won't partake but would love to see what you all get up to with this, it sounds interesting and fun and can be something really awesome to read!!!
I've been busy too. I realize we've slowed down on this, but I haven't given up.
I think we got off on the wrong foot. I tried to produce something through a swarm without first familiarizing people with how a swarm works, or how much fun it can be. So, I'd like everyone to open accounts with UNU2.
Also, can we all share our time zones and online hours? I'm on UTC+08:00 and I'm usually around from midnight to 6 am.
I'm GMT, and on mondays and wednesdays and weekends im around 1pm-12pm, wouldnt have the time or energy to do anything on other days
This time zone converter1 seems the most intuitive. Could I get everyone's home city or thereabouts? I live in Metro Manila.
I've been very busy, but I'm still up for this. I'll usually be available for most of the day on the weekends, and I'm limited to the evenings on weekdays UTC -5.
I'll be hanging out on unu.ai for the rest of the night. Would anyone care to join me? I'm joe20150506.
The website I mentioned is a bit buggy when it comes to time zones. Home cities are a bit less ambiguous.
As an update, we've shifted direction to promoting a chatroom on UNU2 as a way of familiarizing people with how swarms work.
I just got a time-intensive gig out of nowhere (I last spoke to the prospective company months ago) so there goes my free time for the forseeable future. 
Sorry, already working with Owlturd Comix on a collab comic (that updates infrequently), and it still has a miniscule subscriber count.
Although I'm trying to get it popular on my own coat tails and not Shen's because I want it to be popular because it's good, not because it has a popular artist/character in it.
If you want to check it out, here it is.
In theory, a swarm of anonymous novice artists should be able to produce a work of professional quality
Only if they have a really good director.
In terms of manga, there's usually the head author and the assistants who do the grunt work in order to make the deadline.
In the manga that I linked prior, I'm working with two others: Shen, who I unofficially appointed as the editor who takes a look at the story, storyboard, rough sketch, script, and the inking to give the thumbs up to continue (since his name is attached to the project), and a girl named Kass who does all the shading and screen tone art. But the quality lies on me, the head artist and director of the project, as I'm making the sketches, rough drafts, story boards, scripting, and other miscellaneous tasks in order to get the quality that I want the comic to have. Although Kass does a great job at shading, it's moot if the line art is poorly done. And even if the art is good, the writing needs to be good otherwise the readers won't stay interested enough for the next issue, which is why I always have an editor of sorts to read over the script.
If you have novice artist work on a project, the end result will still be a novice project.
But, if you have a team of skilled artists working on something, seeing that they know what they're doing, then you'll output something at professional quality.
But with swarm technology, a group is able to think for itself and make its own decisions. It's direct democracy, and real-time too.
If that were the case, then you end up with a very mixed story. Without a clear vision of how the project should go, you might end up with a story that meanders on until an immediate stop.
Also, in a direct democracy, you might end up with a few individuals bitter about the decision made and refuse to work on the project (or worse choose to sabotage the project) out of spite.
Again, with swarm technology a group stops being merely a crowd and starts acting like a collective. Are you at all familiar with human swarming1? A swarm is able to provide its own leadership.
Possible, but then, they weren't forced into this in the first place. They knew ahead of time that collaboration was the name of the game.
A collective with ideas and their own individual interpretations. Sure it can work in the world of science, but art isn't something you can create with an equation or a set of numbers or survey. It's subjective.
Even the most well-collaborated of groups usually fall breaking apart because of their different interpretations of a subject.
why would you think that a mind-of-minds (one made up of human minds) would be any less human than its individual members? This isn't an amalgamation of greed like a roomful of shareholders, this is a cooperative on the level of a Star Trek Trill or a Steven Universe gem fusion.
A hive excels at making choices. And at the end of the day, the process of art is nothing but choices.
Maybe a hive won't have those personal quirks that make an individual artist so distinctive. But it doesn't take very great insights to write a potboiler, which you'll notice is kind of what we were aiming for. A good story, if not necessarily an original one. Surely a group of people can produce an effective piece of entertainment. Hollywood studios used to do it all the time.
And who is to say that a hive mind won't have its own particular quirks? I'm reminded of Good Omens, which isn't quite a Pratchett book or a Gaiman book. It's both of thos things, and at the same time neither of those things. And it is awesome.
Okay, but with Hollywood writers, or when you're in a creative meeting, you still have someone overseeing the writing, like the head writer, the producers, or the director.
Duos on the other hand have to make decisions with each other, compromise, solve problems. It's a partnership between two people that are working with each other through a power dynamic that they've established.
If you feel that people won't be able to relate to a swarm as a person, and therefore as a leader, I invite you to look into The Philip experiment,1 where a paranormal society successfully made contact with an entirely fictional spirit.