Augmented Collective Intelligence

(Video) CrowdTrust manages crowdsourcing projects through dynamic social networks of verified topic experts and user communities. A prototype tool is under development to gauge the effect of collaborative newsgathering on quality, speed and cost of reporting.

It's been three years since Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" in his Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing." The term, which describes an online, distributed problem solving and production model, is most famously represented in the business operations of companies like Threadless and InnoCentive and in contests like the Goldcorp Challenge and the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest.

In each of these cases, the company has a problem it needs solved or a product it needs designed. The company broadcasts this challenge on its Web site to an online community--a crowd--and the crowd submits designs and solutions in response. Next--and this is a key component of crowdsourcing--the crowd vets the submissions of its peers, critiquing and ranking submissions until winners emerge.

A challenge of managing a virtual team is getting timely and thorough input and participation from team members. Whether it’s voicing an opinion on an internal company policy or putting in their two cents during a creative brainstorming session for a client project, not being in the same room can leave some folks out of the mix, despite your best efforts to be inclusive. One way to ensure everyone has their say — or is at least given the opportunity to provide input — is to apply some principles of crowdsourcing to internal team communications.

Collective Intelligence (CI) is complex by nature. It is not merely the sum of what a group knows, but the intelligence that emerges from it. This “emergent” behavior is of a different nature and we can see it at play in perfectly balanced ecosystems where swarm-like behavior produces astounding results that exceed the intelligence of any one creature acting alone. [

By looking at collective intelligence (CI) through four distinct lenses, this paper draws on recent research in organizational design, evolutionary economics, cognitive sciences, knowledge ecology and political economy to built a twin path forward: collective intelligence and collective leadership. It lays out elements of a framework for building this twin path beyond chaos. It is our intent to invite conversations designed to engage questions surrounding this interdependent evolutionary path. How might we develop criteria for a design capable of supporting a large range of collective intelligence phenomena in an integrated way?

STDP is a simple idea, but it has been shown to be a surprisingly powerful way that the brain uses for rapid pattern recognition and classification [1][2]. It turns out that using STDP, neurons naturally learn to specialize in detecting certain patterns in their inputs, even in the presence of lots of noise.

So what in the world does this have to do with social networks? There is an intriguing analogy between networks of neurons operating by the STDP rule and the emerging structure and functioning of real-time social networks like Twitter.

The immediate question this raises, of why we are so much better at collective endeavors than the ancients, can be answered fairly simply. To a first approximation, the answer is: brute force and massive literacy. We teach nearly everyone to read and write, and to do it, by historical standards, at a high level. This lets us staff large bureaucracies (by some estimates, over 40% of the US workforce does data-handling), which lets us run an industrial economy (the trains run on time), which makes us rich enough to afford to educate everyone and keep them in bureaucratic employment, with some surplus left over to expand the system. This would do us no good if our ideas of administration were as shabby as those of our ancestors in the dark ages, but they're not: we inherited those of the ancient empires, and have had quite a while to improve upon them (and improvements are made easier and faster by the large number of administrators and the high standard of literacy).