Crowds, Co-Intelligence, and Expertise
From the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence working paper "Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence" (pdf) by Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, and Chrysanthos Dellarocas:
Google. Wikipedia. Threadless. All are well-known examples of large, loosely organized groups of people working together electronically in surprisingly effective ways. ... To unlock the potential of collective intelligence, managers ... need a deeper understanding of how these systems work. ...
[W]e identified a relatively small set of building blocks that are combined and recombined in various ways in different collective intelligence systems. To classify these building blocks, we use two pairs of related questions:
Who is performing the task? Why are they doing it?
What is being accomplished? How is it being done?
I caught reference to the MIT paper in the recent NYT article "The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)" by Steve Lohr:
[A] look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. ...
In October 2006, Netflix, the movie rental company, announced that it would pay $1 million to the contestant who could improve the movie recommendations made by Netflix’s internal software, Cinematch, by at least 10 percent. ... The frontrunner is a seven-person team, and its members are statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel.
Tom Atlee, author of "The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All," comments:
Lohr goes to great pains to stress the role of experts in such public engagements. While his point is well taken, he unfortunately does not wonder what more could have been achieved if participants' IDEAS had been available to -- and discussed by -- the full crowd of participants to tap the creative sparks that often arise through interaction.
Here's the missing piece I see: If ideas had been shared, the role of expertise would have been perhaps enhanced by the random insights of outsiders who -- although often free of the assumptions and constraints that limit insiders -- lack experience needed to evaluate or implement their out-of-the-box ideas. If all ideas had been shared and discussed, experts who were open-minded enough to recognize a good idea when they saw it could grab the ball and run with it. Under such conditions, the experts who were most successful at recognizing, grabbing, and running with good ideas would produce the best innovations. The Netflix contest's winner-takes-all design does not motivate competitors to share their ideas nor is any forum provided for that to happen, so although PEOPLE can regroup in new configurations, IDEAS can't.
