collective intelligence

Towards Crowd-Scale Deliberation

Curated on June 19, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Klein: “Let us define deliberation as the activity where groups of people (1) identify possible solutions for a problem, (2) evaluate these alternatives, and (3) select the solution(s) that best meet their needs. Deliberation processes have changed little in centuries. Typically, small groups of powerful players craft policies behind closed doors, and then battle to engage wider support for their preferred options. Most people affected by the decisions have at best limited input into defining the solution options. This approach has become increasingly inadequate as the scale and complexity of the problems we face has increased. Many important ideas and perspectives simply do not get incorporated, squandering the opportunity for far superior outcomes. We have the potential to do much better by radically widening the circle of people involved in complex deliberations, moving from “team” scales (tens of participants) to “crowd” scales (hundreds, thousands, or more).

This is because crowd-scale interactions have been shown to produce, in appropriate circumstances, such powerful emergent phenomena as:

The long tail: crowd-scale participation enables access to a much greater diversity of ideas than would otherwise be practical: potentially superior solutions “small voices” (the tail of the frequency distribution) have a chance to be heard .
Idea synergy: the ability for users to share their creations in a common forum can enable a synergistic explosion of creativity, since people often develop new ideas by forming novel combinations and extensions of ideas that have been put out by others.
Many eyes: crowds can produce remarkably high-quality results (e.g. in open source software) by virtue of the fact that there are multiple independent verifications – many eyes continuously checking the shared content for errors and correcting them .
Wisdom of the crowds: large groups of (appropriately independent, motivated and informed) contributors can collectively make better judgments than those produced by the individuals that make them up, often exceeding the performance of experts,because their collective judgment cancels out the biases and gaps of the individual members…

Our team has been developing crowd-scale deliberation support technologies that address these three fundamental challenges by enabling:

better ideation: helping crowds develop better solution ideas
better evaluation: helping crowds evaluate potential solutions more accurately
better decision-making: helping crowds select pareto-optimal solutions…(More)”.

Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World

Curated on June 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.

Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes—from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events—and shows how to avoid them.

Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.

Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive….(More)”

Nobody Is Smarter or Faster Than Everybody

Curated on June 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rod Collins at Huffington Post: “One of the deepest beliefs of command-and-control management is the assumption that the smartest organization is the one with the smartest individuals. This belief is as old as scientific management itself. According to this way of thinking, just as there is a right way to perform every activity, there are right individuals who are essential for defining what are the right things and for making sure that things are done right. Thus, traditional organizations have long held that the key to the successful achievement of the corporation’s two basic accountabilities of strategy and execution is to hire the smartest individual managers and the brightest functional experts.

Command-and-control management assumes that intelligence fundamentally resides in a select number of star performers who are able to leverage their expertise across large groups of people through proper direction and effective control. Thus, the recruiting efforts and the promotional practices of most companies are focused on competing for and retaining the most talented people. While established management thinking holds that most individual workers are replaceable, this is not so for those star performers whose decision-making and problem-solving prowess are heroically revered. Traditional hierarchical organizations firmly believe in the myth of the individual hero. They are convinced that a single highly intelligent individual can make the difference between success and failure, whether that person is a key senior executive, a functional expert, or even a highly paid consultant.

However, in a rapidly changing world, it is becoming painfully obvious to harried executives that no single individual or even an elite cadre of star performers can adequately process the ever-evolving knowledge of fast-changing markets into operational excellence in real-time. Eric Teller, the CEO of Google X, has astutely recognized that we now live in a world where the pace of technological change exceeds the capacity for most individuals to absorb these changes in real time. If we can’t depend upon smart individuals to process change in time to respond to market developments, what options do business leaders have?

Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody

If business executives want to build smart companies in a rapidly changing world, they will need to think differently and discover the most untapped resource in their organizations: the collective intelligence of their own people. Innovative organizations, such as Wikipedia and Google, have made this discovery and have leveraged the power of collective intelligence into powerful business models that have radically transformed their industries. The struggling online encyclopedia Nupedia rescued itself from oblivion when it serendipitously discovered an obscure application known as a wiki and transformed itself into Wikipedia by using the wiki platform to leverage the power of collective intelligence. In less than a decade, Wikipedia became the world’s most popular general reference resource. Google, which was a late entry into a crowded field of search engine upstarts, quickly garnered two-thirds of the search market by becoming the first engine to use the wisdom of crowds to rank web pages. These successful enterprises have uncovered the essential management wisdom for our times: Nobody is smarter or faster than everybody….

While smart individuals are important in any organization, it isn’t their unique intelligence that is paramount but rather their unique contributions to the overall intelligence of teams. That’s because the blending of the diverse perspectives of different types of intelligences is often the fastest path to the solution of complex problems, as we learned in the summer of 2011 when a diverse group of over 250,000 experts, non-experts, and unusual suspects in a scientific gaming community called Foldit, solved in ten days a biomolecular problem that had alluded the world’s best scientists for over ten years. This means a self-organized group that required no particular credentials for membership was 365 times more effective and efficient than the world’s most credentialed individual experts. Similarly, the non-credentialed contributors of Wikipedia were able to produce approximately 18,000 articles in its first year of operation compared to only 25 articles produced by academic experts in Nupedia’s first year. This means the wisdom of the crowd was 720 times more effective and efficient than the individual experts. These results are completely counterintuitive to everything that most of us have been taught about how intelligence works. However, as counterintuitive as this may seem, the preeminence of collective intelligence has suddenly become a practical reality thanks to proliferation of digital technology over the last two decades.

As we move from the first wave of the digital revolution, which was sparked by connecting people via the Internet, to the second wave where everyone and everything will be hyper-connected in the emerging Internet of Things, our capacity to aggregate and leverage collective intelligence is likely to accelerate as practical applications of artificial intelligence become everyday realities….(More)”.

Social Network for Doctors to Transform Medical Crowdsourcing

Curated on June 14, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “SERMO, a global social network for physicians has expanded its footprint globally to revolutionize medical crowdsourcing. SERMO is now open to physicians on all seven continents, delivering on its promise from day one to unite physicians from every corner of the globe, ensuring the free flow of expert information amongst physicians.

Now available in more than 150 countries, physicians from both rural and urban areas, in developed and developing nations, can be exposed to the same expertise from their peers, providing an even higher level of care to their patients.

According to one orthopedic surgeon from Greece, SERMO offers “Exciting doctor interactions, is very helpful with difficult cases and always prompts us with very interesting social topics and discussions. It is a form of collective intelligence that allows individuals to achieve more than they could on their own.”

Combined with last month’s Drug Ratings launch, physicians will now be able to evaluate prescription drugs, in addition to communicating with peers and solving tough patient cases. These tools are revolutionizing the way physicians exchange and obtain information, as well as offer personalized care to their patients. With over 300,000 drug ratings gathered since the beta launch began last year, Ratings enables doctors globally to share prescription drug treatment experiences with their peers, transforming how physicians around the world make prescribing decisions in their daily practice.

SERMO’s membership has grown from 130,000 in 2012, when SERMO merged with WorldOne, to 650,000 total members prior to today’s expansion – now, the network includes close to 800,000 physicians….(More)”.

Microtasking: Redefining crowdsourcing practices in emergency management

Curated on May 27, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Poblet, Marta; Fitzpatrick, Mari and Chhetri, Prem: “…examines the roles, types and forms of virtual microtasking for emergency information management in order to better understand collective intelligence mechanisms and the potential for logistics response. Using three case studies this paper reviews the emerging body of knowledge in microtasking practices in emergency management to demonstrate how crowd-sourced information is captured and processed during emergency events to provide critical intelligence throughout the emergency cycle. It also considers the impact of virtual information collection, collation and management on traditional humanitarian operations and relief efforts.

Based on the case studies the emergent forms of microtasking for emergency information management were identified. Opportunities for continuities, adaptations and innovations are explained. The contribution of virtual microtasking extends to all supply chain strategic domains to help maximise resource use and optimise service delivery response….(More)”

A Framework for Assessing Technology Hubs in Africa

Curated on May 19, 2017October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jeremy de Beer, Paula Millar, Jacquelen Mwangi, Victor B. Nzomo, and Isaac Rutenberg: “This article explains the importance of technology hubs as drivers of innovation, social change, and economic opportunity within and beyond the African continent. The article is the first to thoroughly review and synthesize findings from multi-disciplinary literature, and integrate insights from qualitative data gathered via interviews and fieldwork. It identifies three archetypes of hubs — clusters, companies, and countries — and discusses examples of each archetype using Kenya as a case study. The article discusses potential collaboration, conflicts, and competition among these archetypes of hubs, and concludes with recommendations for future researchers….(More)”

SeeClickFix Empowers Citizens by Connecting Them to Their Local Governments

Curated on May 9, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ben Berkowitz and Jean-Paul Gagnon in Democratic Theory: “SeeClickFix began in 2009 when founder and present CEO Ben Berkowitz spotted a piece of graffiti in his New Haven, Connecticut, neighborhood. After calling numerous departments at city hall in a bid to have the graffiti removed, Berkowitz felt no closer to fixing the problem. Confused and frustrated, his emotions resonated with what many citizens in real- existing democracies feel today (Manning 2015): we see problems in public and want to fix them but can’t. This all too habitual inability for “common people” to fix problems they have to live with on a day-to-day basis is a prelude to the irascible citizen (White 2012), which, according to certain scholars (e.g., Dean 1960; Lee 2009), is itself a prelude to political apathy and a citizen’s alienation from specific political institutions….(More)”

Bigger data, less wisdom: the need for more inclusive collective intelligence in social service provision

Curated on April 18, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexander Fink in AI & Society: “Social service organizations have long used data in their efforts to support people in need for the purposes of advocacy, tracking, and intervention. Increasingly, such organizations are joining forces to provide wrap-around services to clients in order to “move the needle” on intractable social problems. Groups using these strategies, called Collective Impact, develop shared metrics to guide their work, sharing data, finances, infrastructure, and services. A major emphasis of these efforts is on tracking clients and measuring impacts. This study explores a particular type of Collective Impact strategy called Promise Neighborhoods. Based on a federal grant program, these initiatives attempt to close the achievement gap in particular geographic communities. Through an analysis of publicly available documents and information, the study analyzes the ways these strategies enact (and fail to enact) a collective intelligence for the common good. The analysis focuses specifically on issues surrounding data collection and use, youth agency, leadership and governance, and funding streams. Together, these foci develop a story of an increasingly used “intelligence” with a limited sense of “collective” and a narrow vision of a “common good.” Using this as a platform, the paper explores alternatives that might develop more robust practices around these concepts….(More)”.

OpenAerialMap

Curated on April 4, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“OpenAerialMap (OAM) is a set of tools for searching, sharing, and using openly licensed satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery.

Built on top of the Open Imagery Network (OIN), OAM is an open service that provides search and access to this imagery…

Use the map to pan and zoom to search available imagery. Imagery can be previewed by selecting a tile and browsing the sidebar. Read the User Guide for more information.

All imagery is publicly licensed and made available through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Open Imagery Network (OIN) Node. All imagery contained in OIN is licensed CC-BY 4.0, with attribution as contributors of Open Imagery Network. All imagery is available to be traced in OpenStreetMap.

OAM is available for sharing and distributing aerial imagery. There are plenty of ways to get involved in OpenAerialMap.

Check out the GitHub repository to learn more about the design and how to get involved in the project….(More)”