Not all problems are equally suited to a collective approach. In this post I propose a way of typifying problems most likely to be successfully treated with CI. Here is a list of 11 attributes of a task or challenge that give reason to believe it is particularly suited for the use of Collective Intelligence. The greater the number of these attributes presents in a certain problem, the greater the chance it is wise to go for a collective stand:

1.- Geographically highly disperse data that is costly to collect: Situations in which collecting and aggregating large amounts of data can significantly improve our analysis but in which this data is so highly dispersed that it is expensive and cannot viably be gathered by a small group of agents.

2.- Vastly varying views when interpreting the problem: When a problem, or its interpretation, can be seen in different lights, depending on the interests, roles and experience of different agents in relation to the challenge, it would seem a good idea to create a collective space in which these differing perspectives can meet. CI is favorable if diversity is a factor that affects the quality of the final results.

3.- Multidisciplinary nature: Situations that may coincide with previous attribute, but in this case refer to cognitive diversity (neither roles nor interests, differing paradigms) that requires the solution of a complex problem with inputs from different fields of knowledge. As we shall see, the greater the mutidisciplinarity of a problem, the more can be gained with CI because participating agents will self-select and no point of view, that can add value to the analysis, will be lost. Read more ›

People often ask me about what kind of problems best leverage the benefits of a collective intelligence (CI) approach. I always say it depends on several factors, but according to my experience I think I am able to advance here seven types of problems or challenges that that can be suitable for open and participatory project with good results:

• Creativity: CI is quite effective at generating ideas. The more people thinking, the more likely they will find a creative solution.

• Bias assessment: Activities those are highly susceptible to selection and assessment biases due to their inherent relativity or spurious interests. CI works well in data interpretation tasks subject to many different perspectives. Opening the analysis to a wide variety of points of view can help reduce the “expert bias” and achieve a more complete and balanced judgment.

• Distributed Surveillance: Activities in which the cost of failure is high. Any errors are best detected if more people are reviewing (Remember Linus’s Law enunciated ​​by Eric Raymond: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow“).

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