‘Collective intelligence’ is not necessarily present in virtual groups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jordan B. Barlow and Alan R. Dennis at LSE: “Do groups of smart people perform better than groups of less intelligent people?

Research published in Science magazine in 2010 reported that groups, like individuals, have a certain level of “collective intelligence,” such that some groups perform consistently well across many different types of tasks, while other groups perform consistently poorly. Collective intelligence is similar to individual intelligence, but at the group level.

Interestingly, the Science study found that collective intelligence was not related to the individual intelligence of group members; groups of people with higher intelligence did not perform better than groups with lower intelligence. Instead, the study found that high performing teams had members with higher social sensitivity – the ability to read the emotions of others using visual facial cues.

Social sensitivity is important when we sit across a table from each other. But what about online, when we exchange emails or text messages? Does social sensitivity matter when I can’t see your face?

We examined the collective intelligence in an online environment in which groups used text-based computer-mediated communication. We followed the same procedures as the original Science study, which used the approach typically used to measure individual intelligence. In individual intelligence tests, a person completes several small “tasks” or problems. An analysis of task scores typically demonstrates that task scores are correlated, meaning that if a person does well on one problem, it is likely that they did well on other problems….

The results were not what we expected. The correlations between our groups’ performance scores were either not statistically significant or significantly negative, as shown in Table 1. The average correlation between any two tasks was -0.05, indicating that performance on one task was not correlated with performance on other tasks. In other words, groups who performed well on one of the tasks were unlikely to perform well on the other tasks…

Our findings challenge the conclusion reported in Science that groups have a general collective intelligence analogous to individual intelligence. Our study shows that no collective intelligence factor emerged when groups used a popular commercial text-based online tool. That is, when using tools with limited visual cues, groups that performed well on one task were no more likely to perform well on a different task. Thus the “collective intelligence” factor related to social sensitivity that was reported in Science is not collective intelligence; it is instead a factor associated with the ability to work well using face-to-face communication, and does not transcend media….(More)”

Open-Sourcing Google Earth Enterprise

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geo Developers Blog: “We are excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Google Earth Enterprise (GEE), the enterprise product that allows developers to build and host their own private maps and 3D globes. With this release, GEE Fusion, GEE Server, and GEE Portable Server source code (all 470,000+ lines!) will be published on GitHub under the Apache2 license in March.

Originally launched in 2006, Google Earth Enterprise provides customers the ability to build and host private, on-premise versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. In March 2015, we announced the deprecation of the product and the end of all sales. To provide ample time for customers to transition, we have provided a two year maintenance period ending on March 22, 2017. During this maintenance period, product updates have been regularly shipped and technical support has been available to licensed customers….

GCP is increasingly used as a source for geospatial data. Google’s Earth Engine has made available over a petabyte of raster datasets which are readily accessible and available to the public on Google Cloud Storage. Additionally, Google uses Cloud Storage to provide data to customers who purchase Google Imagerytoday. Having access to massive amounts of geospatial data, on the same platform as your flexible compute and storage, makes generating high quality Google Earth Enterprise Databases and Portables easier and faster than ever.

We will be sharing a series of white papers and other technical resources to make it as frictionless as possible to get open source GEE up and running on Google Cloud Platform. We are excited about the possibilities that open-sourcing enables, and we trust this is good news for our community. We will be sharing more information when we launch the code in March on GitHub. For general product information, visit the Google Earth Enterprise Help Center. Review the essential and advanced training for how to use Google Earth Enterprise, or learn more about the benefits of Google Cloud Platform….(More)”

Governing with Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Saunders and Geoff Mulgan at Nesta: “This paper provides an introduction to collective intelligence in government. It aims to be useful and relevant to governments of countries at very different levels of development. It highlights the ways in which governments are better understanding the world around them, drawing on ideas and expertise from their citizens, and encouraging greater scrutiny of their actions.

Collective intelligence is a new term to describe something which is in some respects old, but in other respects changing dramatically thanks to advances in digital technologies. It refers to the ability of large groups – a community, region, city or nation – to think and act intelligently in a way that amounts to more than the sum of their parts.

Key findings

Our analysis of government use of collective intelligence initiatives around the world finds that activities fall into four broad categories:

1. Better understanding facts and experiences: using new digital tools to gather data from many more sources.

2. Better development of options and ideas: tapping into the collective brainpower of citizens to come up with better ideas and options for action.

3. Better, more inclusive decision-making: involving citizens in decision making, from policymaking to planning and budgeting.

4. Better oversight of what is done: encouraging broader involvement in the oversight of government activity, from monitoring corruption to scrutinising budgets, helping to increase accountability and transparency….(More)”

Pushing the Limits of Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stanford Innovation Lab Podcast with Tina Seelig:

“Imagine a collective brain shaped by human insights and powered by technology – that’s crowdsourcing. Michael Bernstein, computer scientist at Stanford University, explores how to harness crowdsourcing to tackle daunting challenges. In this episode of Stanford Innovation Lab, Tina Seelig meets with Michael to discuss examples of successful crowdsourcing, tools to gather collective insights, and the evolving relationship between humans and machines….(More)”

 

Esri, Waze Partnership: A Growing Trend in Sharing Data for the Benefit of All?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Justine Brown at GovTech: “Esri and Waze announced in mid-October that they’re partnering to help local governments alleviate traffic congestion and analyze congestion patterns. Called the Waze Connected Citizens Program, the program — which enables local governments that use the Esri ArcGIS platform to exchange publicly available traffic data with Waze — may represent a growing trend in which citizens and government share data for the benefit of all.

Connecting Esri and Waze data will allow cities to easily share information about the conditions of their roads with drivers, while drivers anonymously report accidents, potholes and other road condition information back to the cities. Local governments can then merge that data into their existing emergency dispatch and street maintenance systems….

Through the Connected Citizen program, Waze shares two main data sets with its government partners: Jams and Alerts….If there’s a major traffic jam in an unusual area, a traffic management center operator might be triggered to examine that area further. For example, Boston recently used Waze jam data to identify a couple of traffic-prone intersections in the Seaport district….Similarly if a Waze user reports a crash, that information shows up on the city’s existing ArcGIS map. City personnel can assess the crash and combine the Waze data with its existing data sets, if desired. The city can then notify emergency response, for example, to address the accident and send out emergency vehicles if necessary….

The Connected Citizen Program could also provide local governments an alternative to IoT investments, because a city can utilize real-time reports from the road rather than investing in sensors and IoT infrastructure. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, for instance, uses data from the Connected Citizen Program in several ways, including to monitor and detect automobile accidents on its roadways….(More)”

Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.

Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.

‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’

Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.

Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.

On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….

Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.

Wikipedia’s not as biased as you might think

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ananya Bhattacharya in Quartz: “The internet is as open as people make it. Often, people limit their Facebook and Twitter circles to likeminded people and only follow certain subreddits, blogs, and news sites, creating an echo chamber of sorts. In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it’s starting to see results

Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia’s online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012.

“That is just not a recipe for coming to a conclusion,” Shane Greenstein, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview. “We were surprised that Wikipedia had not failed, had not fallen apart in the last several years.”

Greenstein and his co-author Feng Zhu categorized each article as “blue” or “red.” Drawing from research in political science, they identified terms that are idiosyncratic to each party. For instance, political scientists have identified that Democrats were more likely to use phrases such as “war in Iraq,” “civil rights,” and “trade deficit,” while Republicans used phrases such as “economic growth,” “illegal immigration,” and “border security.”…

“In comparison to expert-based knowledge, collective intelligence does not aggravate the bias of online content when articles are substantially revised,” the authors wrote in the paper. “This is consistent with a best-case scenario in which contributors with different ideologies appear to engage in fruitful online conversations with each other, in contrast to findings from offline settings.”

More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time. “You can ask questions like ‘do editors with red tendencies tend to go to red articles or blue articles?’” Greenstein said. “You find a prevalence of opposites attract, and that was striking.” The researchers even identified the political stance for a number of anonymous editors based on their IP locations, and the trend held steadfast….(More)”

Essays on collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Yiftach Nagar: “This dissertation consists of three essays that advance our understanding of collective-intelligence: how it works, how it can be used, and how it can be augmented. I combine theoretical and empirical work, spanning qualitative inquiry, lab experiments, and design, exploring how novel ways of organizing, enabled by advancements in information technology, can help us work better, innovate, and solve complex problems.

The first essay offers a collective sensemaking model to explain structurational processes in online communities. I draw upon Weick’s model of sensemaking as committed-interpretation, which I ground in a qualitative inquiry into Wikipedia’s policy discussion pages, in attempt to explain how structuration emerges as interpretations are negotiated, and then committed through conversation. I argue that the wiki environment provides conditions that help commitments form, strengthen and diffuse, and that this, in turn, helps explain trends of stabilization observed in previous research.

In the second essay, we characterize a class of semi-structured prediction problems, where patterns are difficult to discern, data are difficult to quantify, and changes occur unexpectedly. Making correct predictions under these conditions can be extremely difficult, and is often associated with high stakes. We argue that in these settings, combining predictions from humans and models can outperform predictions made by groups of people, or computers. In laboratory experiments, we combined human and machine predictions, and find the combined predictions more accurate and more robust than predictions made by groups of only people or only machines.

The third essay addresses a critical bottleneck in open-innovation systems: reviewing and selecting the best submissions, in settings where submissions are complex intellectual artifacts whose evaluation require expertise. To aid expert reviewers, we offer a computational approach we developed and tested using data from the Climate CoLab – a large citizen science platform. Our models approximate expert decisions about the submissions with high accuracy, and their use can save review labor, and accelerate the review process….(More)”

Innovando para una mejor gestión: La contribución de los laboratorios de innovación pública

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Acevedo, Sebastián; and Dassen, Nicolás for IDB: “Los cambios tecnológicos, económicos y sociales de los últimos años exigen gobiernos capaces de adaptarse a nuevos desafíos y a las crecientes demandas de la ciudadanía. En muchos países y en distintos niveles de gobierno, esto ha llevado a la creación de laboratorios de innovación, unidades cuyo objetivo es promover de diversos modos la innovación en el sector público. En este trabajo se analizan los roles y desafíos de los laboratorios latinoamericanos, contrastándolos con buenas prácticas y características que la literatura ha asociado a mayores niveles de innovación en el sector público y en otras organizaciones.

A partir de una encuesta a directores de laboratorios y dos estudios de casos, se describe el panorama de los laboratorios latinoamericanos y se discuten sus desafíos para: i) trabajar sobre temas centrales de la gestión, ii) conseguir la adopción de innovaciones y el escalamiento de las mismas y iii) asegurar la sostenibilidad de estas.

En particular, hay cuatro factores clave para su desempeño en esos aspectos: dos factores político-institucionales –el apoyo del liderazgo y las redes de política– y dos factores metodológicos –la adecuación técnica de las innovaciones y la construcción de un significado compartido sobre ellas–.

Además, se identifican dos diferencias principales entre la mayoría de los laboratorios relevados aquí y la experiencia de otras regiones, descripta por la literatura existente: un foco más intenso en temas de gobierno abierto y menos actividades para el testeo controlado de innovaciones, como experimentos aleatorios y evaluaciones de impacto. Finalmente, se presentan conclusiones y recomendaciones para la consolidación de los laboratorios como canales efectivos para gestionar innovaciones, manejando los riesgos inherentes, y modernizar la gestión… (More Español)

Participatory Budgeting in the United States: A Guide for Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., Daniel Boden: “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government.Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)”