The Collective Intelligence Blog

Crowdsourcing/Co-creation, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Participation

Types of problems that can be solved by Collective Intelligence

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“).

Complexity, Decision Making/Problem Solving, Emergence/Self-organization, Governance/Leadership, Interdisciplinary approaches, Politics/Democracy, Social Networks

Biomimetics and Collective Intelligence

Nature can inspire us to explore emerging models of interaction that will help to better understand patterns of collective intelligence in human groups. Steven Johnson, in his book “Emerging Systems” (2001), masterfully demonstrates how that connection (called Biomimicry or biomimetics) is full of metaphors. The Web Ask Nature, the Biomimicry Institute, brings together hundreds of examples of such associations.

In a previous post I mentioned that one of the things I liked about the Collective Intelligence Conference held at MIT in April 2012 was to listen to Deborah Gordon (Stanford) and Ian Couzin (Princeton), two behavioral biologists, who focused on the study of the patterns of behavior of animals in their natural habitats. They are not “biologists” in its classical sense but work as multidisciplinary groups that are making increasing use of mathematics and computer science as well as tracking and geolocation devices to investigate the collective behavior of swarms or “Swarm Intelligence“, a branch of artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized and self-organized systems. Read more ›

by Amalio Rey × May 5, 2014 × 1 comment

Collaboration Culture, Complexity, Group Performance, Network Design, Participation

7 forces that influence community building

It’s hard to question the superiority of networks for activities such as collaborative learning (type “communities of practice“), experimentation with new cultural approaches, idea generation, or to mobilize in favor of some collective claim.

But what happens when the challenge is to put many people to work together to achieve certain results respecting deadlines and costs, and also do it by cultivating an ongoing relationship . I’m talking about “productive” and “stable” networks, that is, a reticulate model without organic links, which poses work for projects within deadlines and that the result can effectively overcome the company.

In my experience, these conditions can only be fulfilled if we conceive networks of higher order, more than “ordinary networks“, and therefore we would have to call them differently, to distinguish them from those based on weak ties structures, which are good to encourage creative and random connections, but not to serve goods and services, or manage complex projects. Read more ›

by Amalio Rey × May 5, 2014 × 1 comment

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

Can you predict the intelligence of a group?

I 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 Amalio Rey × May 5, 2014 × 0 comments

Collaboration Culture, Emergence/Self-organization, Group Performance, Participation, Reputation mechanisms

Open Participation vs. Expert Groups: Biases and filters

During the training workshops I give, the participants often ask me the following question: what are the advantages and disadvantages of the open participatory models vs. expert groups?

This issue appears at almost every debate on collective intelligence. I could use Manichaean way of saying it: “collective intelligence ALWAYS works better than the experts“, but it is not true. There are circumstances that give advantage to one option over the other, and even though both of them have their drawbacks.

I used to think that the answer has laid in the level of the “technical” complexity of the problem. I thought if it was a very complex problem, with specific expert skills requirements, then the experts solution could work better. But then I´ve realized that it is not so relevant, and that the key to succeed is how you design the spaces for participation.