Paper by Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al: “Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems….(More)”.
Seek diversity to solve complexity
Katrin Prager at Nature: “As a social scientist, I know that one person cannot solve a societal problem on their own — and even a group of very intelligent people will struggle to do it. But we can boost our chances of success if we ensure not only that the team members are intelligent, but also that the team itself is highly diverse.
By ‘diverse’ I mean demographic diversity encompassing things such as race, gender identity, class, ethnicity, career stage and age, and cognitive diversity, including differences in thoughts, insights, disciplines, perspectives, frames of reference and thinking styles. And the team needs to be purposely diverse instead of arbitrarily diverse.
In my work I focus on complex world problems, such as how to sustainably manage our natural resources and landscapes, and I’ve found that it helps to deliberately assemble diverse teams. This effort requires me to be aware of the different ways in which people can be diverse, and to reflect on my own preferences and biases. Sometimes the teams might not be as diverse as I’d like. But I’ve found that making the effort not only to encourage diversity, but also to foster better understanding between team members reaps dividends….(more)”
Pooling society’s collective intelligence helped fight COVID – it must help fight future crises too
Aleks Berditchevskaia and Kathy Peach at The Conversation: “A Global Pandemic Radar is to be created to detect new COVID variants and other emerging diseases. Led by the WHO, the project aims to build an international network of surveillance hubs, set up to share data that’ll help us monitor vaccine resistance, track diseases and identify new ones as they emerge.
This is undeniably a good thing. Perhaps more than any event in recent memory, the COVID pandemic has brought home the importance of pooling society’s collective intelligence and finding new ways to share that combined knowledge as quickly as possible.
At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity that’s created when diverse groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and knowledge to solve a problem. Digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent years – connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data.
So what have we learned over the last 18 months of collective intelligence pooling that can inform the Global Pandemic Radar? Building from the COVID crisis, what lessons will help us perfect disease surveillance and respond better to future crises?…(More)”
Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups
Paper by Christoph Riedl: “Collective intelligence (CI) is critical to solving many scientific, business, and other problems, but groups often fail to achieve it. Here, we analyze data on group performance from 22 studies, including 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. Our results support the conclusion that a robust CI factor characterizes a group’s ability to work together across a diverse set of tasks. We further show that CI is predicted by the proportion of women in the group, mediated by average social perceptiveness of group members, and that it predicts performance on various out-of-sample criterion tasks. We also find that, overall, group collaboration process is more important in predicting CI than the skill of individual members….(More)”
Harnessing collective intelligence to find missing children
Cordis: “It is estimated that over 250 000 children go missing every year in the EU. Statistics on their recovery is scant, but based on data from the EU-wide 116 000 hotline, 14 % of runaways and 57 % of migrant minors reported missing in 2019 had not been found by the end of the year. The EU-supported ChildRescue project has developed a collective intelligence and stakeholder communication approach for missing children investigations. It consists of a collaborative platform and two mobile apps available for organisations, verified volunteers and the general public. “ChildRescue is being used by our piloting organisations and is already becoming instrumental in missing children investigations. The public response has exceeded our expectations, with over 22 000 app downloads,” says project coordinator Christos Ntanos from the Decision Support Systems Laboratory at the National Technical University of Athens. ChildRescue has also published a white paper on the need for a comprehensive legal framework on missing unaccompanied migrant minors in the EU….
To assist in missing children investigations, ChildRescue trained machine learning algorithms to find underlying patterns useful for investigations. As input, they used structured information about individual cases combined with open data from multiple sources, alongside data from similar past cases. The ChildRescue community mobile app issues real-time alerts near places of interest, such as where a child was last seen. Citizens can respond with information, including photos, exclusively accessible by the organisation involved in the case. The quality, relevance and credibility of this feedback are assessed by an algorithm. The organisation can then pass information to the police and engage its own volunteers. Team members can share real-time information through a dedicated private collaboration space….(More)”.
How to make good group decisions
Report by Nesta: “The report has five sections that cover different dimensions of group decisions: group composition, group dynamics, the decision making process, the decision rule and uncertainty….Key takeaways:
- Diversity is the most important factor for a group’s collective intelligence. Both identity and functional (e.g. different skills and experience levels) diversity are necessary for better problem solving and decision making.
- Increasing the size of the decision making group can help to increase diversity, skills and creativity. Organisations could be much better at leveraging the wisdom of the crowd for certain tasks such as idea generation, prioritisation of options (especially eliminating bad options), and accurate forecasts.
- A quick win for decision makers is to focus on developing cross-cutting skills within teams. Important skills to train in your teams include probabilistic reasoning to improve risk analysis, cognitive flexibility to make full use of available information and perspective taking to correct for assumptions..
- It’s not always efficient for groups to push themselves to find the optimal solution or group consensus, and in many cases they don’t need to. ‘Satisficing’ helps to maintain quality under pressure by agreeing in advance what is ‘good enough’.
- Introducing intermittent breaks where group members work independently is known to improve problem solving for complex tasks. The best performing teams tend to have periods of intense communication with little or no interaction in between.
- When the external world is unstable, like during a financial crisis or political elections, traditional sources of expertise often fail due to overconfidence. This is when novel data and insights gathered through crowdsourcing or collective intelligence methods that capture frontline experience are most important….(More)”.
The Co-Creation Compass: From Research to Action.
Policy Brief by Jill Dixon et al: ” Modern public administrations face a wider range of challenges than in the past, from designing effective social services that help vulnerable citizens to regulating data sharing between banks and fintech startups to ensure competition and growth to mainstreaming gender policies effectively across the departments of a large public administration.
These very different goals have one thing in common. To be solved, they require collaboration with other entities – citizens, companies and other public administrations and departments. The buy-in of these entities is the factor determining success or failure in achieving the goals. To help resolve this problem, social scientists, researchers and students of public administration have devised several novel tools, some of which draw heavily on the most advanced management thinking of the last decade.
First and foremost is co-creation – an awkward sounding word for a relatively simple idea: the notion that better services can be designed and delivered by listening to users, by creating feedback loops where their success (or failure) can be studied, by frequently innovating and iterating incremental improvements through small-scale experimentation so they can deliver large-scale learnings and by ultimately involving users themselves in designing the way these services can be made most effective and best be delivered.
Co-creation tools and methods provide a structured manner for involving users, thereby maximising the probability of satisfaction, buy-in and adoption. As such, co-creation is not a digital tool; it is a governance tool. There is little doubt that working with citizens in re-designing the online service for school registration will boost the usefulness and effectiveness of the service. And failing to do so will result in yet another digital service struggling to gain adoption….(More)”
How video conferencing reduces vocal synchrony and collective intelligence
Paper by Maria Tomprou et al: “Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems. Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can it be achieved when collaborators are physically separated? Here, we hypothesize and test the effect of nonverbal synchrony on CI that develops through visual and audio cues in physically-separated teammates. We show that, contrary to popular belief, the presence of visual cues surprisingly has no effect on CI; furthermore, teams without visual cues are more successful in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns, and when they do so, they have higher CI. Our findings show that nonverbal synchrony is important in distributed collaboration and call into question the necessity of video support….(More)”.
Wikipedia @ 20
Stories of an Incomplete Revolution edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner (Open Access): “We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world’s most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia’s first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.
The contributors consider Wikipedia’s history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it….(More)”
Trace Labs
Trace Labs is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to accelerate
the family reunification of missing persons while training members in
the trade craft of open source intelligence (OSINT)….We crowdsource open source intelligence through both the Trace Labs OSINT Search Party CTFs and Ongoing Operations with our global community. Our highly skilled intelligence analysts then triage the data collected to produce actionable intelligence reports on each missing persons subject. These intelligence reports allow the law enforcement agencies that we work with the ability to quickly see any new details required to reopen a cold case and/or take immediate action on a missing subject.(More)”