Examples/Cases

Aggregation mechanisms, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Emergence/Self-organization, Examples/Cases, Governance/Leadership, Participation, Participatory architectures, Politics/Democracy, Reputation mechanisms

Design principles of participatory architectures for democracy based on collective intelligence (III)

Collective sample

To complete the trilogy of posts that I am writing in this blog to discuss the possibilities that Design offers to conceive participatory spaces that reinforce the democracy (I recommend first read the two previous releases: post I and post II), I will share as advance of the research I am doing for my book, a decalogue of principles that, in my own experience as a designer of participatory architectures, are critical for collective intelligence to be genuinely democratic

1. SIMPLICITY:

Simple rules allow for complex behaviors. Design guidelines must be minimal. The objective is to define basic principles for structuring the conversation and the aggregation. They should be a few but powerful. Be careful about over-designing because that, paradoxically, encourages simplistic behavior. Read more ›

by × June 16, 2017 × 1 comment

Aggregation mechanisms, Collaboration Culture, Complexity, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Emergence/Self-organization, Examples/Cases, Governance/Leadership, Group Performance, Participation, Politics/Democracy

Scaling is a big challenge for Collective Intelligence

Crecimiento_escaladoIt seems quite clear that the new “collaborative economy” is a good example of how advances in Collective Intelligence can add a lot of value through mechanisms like “collective filtering” attenuating the impact of “the Paradox of Choice”. The Basque consultant Julen Iturbe explains it very well in a blog post: As collaborative products and services eliminate scarcity of professional services and can be provided by anyone with a resource (a room at home, a seat in the car…) to spare, we face a hitherto unknown problem: “the offer can overwhelm our capacity to deal with it”, and this is when we really have to talk about getting attention.

I don’t think that these initiatives will die being over bloated and hypertrophic as Julen suggests. This will not happen because abundance automatically tends to create its own selection mechanisms. New P2P intermediaries like Airbnb know this very well. Indeed their differentiation efforts are now centered on two aspects: 1) recruitment, 2) filtering.

However overwhelming the offer, there will always be a way to get on to the “front page” without being dragged down by Schwartz’s paradox. I am a frequent client of Airbnb and my choices are based on the comments of people that have stayed in the rooms I am checking. It may well be that this filtering mechanism is not optimal and doesn’t quite satisfy expectations, but the same is true of the offer of more traditional middlemen such as Booking or Trivago.

Obviously there is no easy solution. I believe that the challenge lies midst metadata and comment/reputation management. The problem of “attention distribution” that is created by abundance cannot be solved by shouting louder, we must improve the mechanisms that help separate the signal from the noise. But what is really interesting is that the problem of choosing a room with Airbnb in Paris is very similar to the problem of scaling as the number of members of a collective. The more people intervening in a dialogue, the greater the risk of it “overwhelming our capacity to deal with it”. Read more ›

by × June 2, 2015 × 1 comment

Aggregation mechanisms, Collaboration Culture, Examples/Cases

Lévy vs. Surowiecki: Collective Intelligence with no Collaboration?

Musical group_Stoney Lane

One of the things I have had trouble explaining when defining the concept of Collective Intelligence is the preceding headline. That is, there are situations that can lead to Collective Intelligence (CI) in which individuals do not interact directly or are even conscious of the fact they form part of the collective.

The MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence and many well-known authors in the field admit both the results of non-conscious aggregations and the consequences of active collaboration as manifestations of CI. In James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”, the book that popularized CI, there are plenty of examples based on pure statistical aggregation, that is, without any direct interaction among participants.

To make the differences between modalities clearer I use the terms “Collected” and “Collaborative” Collective Intelligence. Let me explain both. Read more ›

by × May 26, 2015 × 3 comments

Aggregation mechanisms, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Examples/Cases, Group Performance

Can you predict the intelligence of a group?

Team buildingI bring here a version of an article published on the website of Emotools almost a year ago: “¿Qué factores predicen que un grupo sea más inteligente?”. Perhaps it seems an old article, but it is worth because it fits the main object of this blog and complements other entries. It was one of the issues most cited in Collective Intelligence MIT Conference 2012 held in Cambridge (Boston) two years ago. This research was done by a team formed by Anita Woolley (Carnegie Mellon) and Christopher Chabris (Union College/MIT), among others, whose results were published in the journal Science with a significant media impact.

By explain in a few words, the challenge was to find out if there are any factors that measure and explain the “intelligence of a group” as an ability to solve tasks by a group in the same way that there is an “Intelligence Quotient(IQ) that estimates the degree of individual intelligence. Hence was born the so-called “C-factor“, which is the counterpart of the IQ coefficient but at a group level. Read more ›

by × May 5, 2014 × 0 comments