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Collective Problems

From Dumb Crowd to Smart Crowd...
For a long time the popular thought was that crowds were stupid. When you gathered a group of people together they became a mob and began to think as one, a phenomenon commonly called ‘mob mentality’. The more people there is, the dumber they become. Everyone’s individual ideas are squashed into one big idea that everyone consents to, meaning the end result is a mainstream idea.



This all changed with a book by James Surowiecki called ‘The Wisdom Of Crowds’. In it he revolutionised the idea of crowds and showed that they could in fact be smart. A bunch of individuals could in fact produce new, creative and innovative ideas, if the ideas were not ‘averaged out’, but instead nurtured.

...To Collective Mayhem
But this new train of thought was widely adopted and the collective intelligence trend boomed.
“I think a lot of people kind of went too far in the other direction, in saying, 'Wow, it's wonderful if we just let everyone participate on the web like in Wikipedia, everything will turn out great.', says Professor Thomas Malone, the Director of the Centre for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This saw the rise of a plethora of websites jumping in, eager to harness the power of collective intelligence, but not knowing how to go about it successfully. This meant many, many failures.

Trying to be all Organic
You can’t engineer collective intelligence by setting up an artificial situation, yet neither can you let the process be completely organic, and arise all on its own accord.
'There is the misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best. That is not true, it's not magic.' (Thomas Malone).
The answer, is that a middle ground approach is needed, as boring as that may be. The most successful types of collective intelligence require planning, rules, organisation and control first and then need to be let go and allow participants to contribute freely. This is a far cry from the sort of ‘melting pot’ mentality, where everyone’s ideas are thrown together and simmer automatically to generate an end product.

Too many Indians, not enough Chiefs
Then it is fair to say for quality collective intelligence to arise, some form of leadership is necessary. No matter how many people you have, nothing will get done if no-one knows what needs to be done. Some direction needs to be provided, otherwise all you gain is a bunch of loosely formed and competing ideas...a big indecipherable mess. James Gosling, the creator of software program ‘Java’ says that it is no coincidence that thousands of companies which use community knowledge are flailing and ineffective, while the company Apple is run by a “dictator with good taste” leads the way in technology design.

Use Me, Don’t Abuse Me
The web-based business ‘Threadless’ is a good example of how to use and not abuse collective intelligence. ‘Threadless’ gets users to submit their own artistic designs, which are then voted upon by other users and the top-rated designs are made into T-shirts which are then sold on the website. Collective Intelligence is about the community on Threadless, voting and discussing t-shirts designed by individuals. Dumbness of Crowds would be expecting the Threadless community to actually design the t-shirts together as a group. The following picture illustrates the 2 common results which occur when groups are asked to design something together, in this case the perfect dog:



Our Experiment
Our ‘Facebook as a way of generating ideas’ experiment fell victim to these common problems:
1. We got too excited too soon. We bought into the myth of collective intelligence as some kind of utopia where we would get a creative result with minimal effort by just ‘putting something out there’.
2. We created an environment that was in some ways too artificial (using a Facebook set up), but in other ways too organic (having little control over it). We modified and modified, but didn’t achieve the perfect balance which is needed to generate quality ideas!
3. We had no real leadership or direction to the collective intelligence.
4. This meant that the results gained were both types of ‘dogs’ from the above image. We got alot of average, mainstream intelligence in the form of viral videos. Whilst amusing, they didn’t generate any new ideas. If we attempted to put these ideas together we would have gotten the Frankenstein Dog - a mismatched collection of ideas with no glue.

For collective intelligence to work it cannot be left to its own devices, it needs work.

Experiment Conclusions

From the responses that we received, it was possible to draw the following conclusions:

• People will often respond much more readily to a question that relates directly to them, rather than a general question.
• People have a strong engagement with online content, and sharing this with others has become a natural activity that users enjoy doing.
• It is much more effective to ask an open question that allows anybody to respond, rather than try to force a response.
• Offering some form of payment is a good way to motivate people to respond.

Although at times we were successful in prompting a response, we failed to establish a collaborative environment in which a collective intelligence could be built. We had hoped that our participants would engage with each other and interact in a natural way as is common on Facebook. Unfortunately the way in which we set up our experiments created an artificial situation and did not facilitate the natural flow of ideas.

There are several ways in which we could improve our methods for future studies:

• We could send out an event invitation to all of our Facebook connections. This could outline the purpose of the study and what we hope to achieve. Doing this would mean that people who were interested would essentially volunteer to particpate. They would understand what was required of them, and interact with others that were involved with the study.
• We could use our statuses over a long period of time to ask a variety of questions. The short experiment that I did with this seemed to elicit a more natural response. We could even experiment with tagging specific friends in the questions to prompt them to respond.
• We could post our questions on our friend's walls. This would make them personally directed and hopefully the recipient would feel obligated to respond. One problem with this is that it is unlikely that others would get involved in the conversation.
• We could send questions out to individuals, asking them to add something and pass it on to some friends, and return it to us. We would lose control over who was receiving the questions, and hopefully receive some interesting responses.

Time to Experiment...

Can Facebook really be used as a platform to collaborate with others and generate creative ideas?



From my Facebook network I chose a group of 30 friends, some who were already mutual friends and some who were not. This was with the idea of trying to have a variety of responses (with people not already knowing one another), but also hoping the pre-existing relationships in the group between friends would mean that they would build on and collaborate with each other’s responses.

I asked this Facebook network the following question:

What is the best idea you can think of for a movie?

There were only two responses for this question, and no discussion amongst participants at all. It was a disappointing failure. I realised this question was too general and quite frankly my participants could not be bothered to respond.

I then came up with a second question which I hoped would be more specific.
If you could choose any cast members for your own movie, who would you choose?

This question was more successful than the first. The responses I gathered were a range of celebrities and movie stars. There was humorous discussion among participants, and responses were a mix of short paragraphs of text and occasional image links. But I couldn’t help thinking that no real intelligence was being created in this forum.

Using the same group of participants, I then modified my question to: “Excluding movie stars, who would you choose to star in your film and why?”

This provoked an interesting increase in responses and a different type of response. One respondent posted this video to the Facebook thread, with the comment: “this kid as lead male, and his bro can be director”.



This first video sparked the uploading of more videos, such as this one with the comment “made by the roommate of some dude tripping out, best character I’ve ever seen, I’d watch him for 2 hours plus”.



Another response was this video with the comment "she's my pick for head writer/producer for my movie, soooo cute".



It was interesting that because the question was raised in an online forum, Facebook, my respondents were more inclined to provide answers that were understood by an online community - evident in the flurry of ‘Youtube celebrities’ in the viral videos that were added to the thread. It was also interesting to see how it only took one viral video for many more of my participants to follow suit and produce a similar response. It was almost like a ‘peer pressure’, or ‘fitting in with the crowd’ situation.

Several more videos were uploaded and discussed socially amongst participants. Most of the discussion was along the lines of “that was heaps funny”. Participants expanded on ideas, such as sending links to other videos starring the ‘World of Warcraft Kid’. The thread had approximately 5 days of high activity between the 2nd and 7th of September. In this period there were a total of 34 responses, many of these were just comments on other participants’ posts though. After this, activity slowed immensely and eventually died off until nothing more was added to the thread as of the 11th of September.

Melissa - Experiment Four

As I was not getting much of a response from sending out questions via email, I decided to try some questions via status updates. This would allow anybody on my Facebook to respond if they had an answer that they would like to share, and it would not be a forced response. I created these statuses at times of relatively high activity.

The first status did not get an immediate response:

I allowed an hour for responses to that question, before posting the next one. The second question received an immediate response from several people:

The following are the links to the sites that were suggested:

• Ted
• Go Fug Yourself
• Texts From Last Night
• Etsy
• Nic Cage As Everyone
• Hide N Seek

And the videos that were recommended:

The fairly extensive response to this question showed that many people have a strong connection with some form of online content, and that sharing this content is quite an easy thing. The responses were quite enthusiastic, and some participants responded more than once.

I also received several responses to my third status:

In this case, one of the respondents posted the same link, showing their connection with that particular blog.

The following day my first status has received a response:

Although the responses provided may not necessarily be useful for creating video content, this experiment demonstrated that it is much easier to receive a response when the question is open to all Facebook connections. As the question was not directed to any particular individuals, only those that felt they had something to contribute responded. This also meant that most of the responses were serious answers, as people were not making jokes in order to feel as though they had provided some kind of answer.

Melissa- Experiment Three

For my third experiment I decided to ask a question that could potentially reveal the sort of content that would generate interest. I expanded the participant group again, and sorted them into groups that knew each other, to promote interaction. The question I asked was:


"What is the funniest thing you have ever seen?"


The response to this was varied, but most that did answer chose to send videos or links. One participant posted a picture:

Two participants posted Youtube videos:

Two participants posted videos of their friends, that were hosted on Facebook.

Although the participants did not respond to the material others had posted, a social discussion thread did emerge. As this sent notifications to all recipients of the email, responses continued to be posted for several days after the message was initially sent.

Melissa- Experiment Two

For my second experiment, I decided to try to ask a question that was more personal to the respondents. I narrowed down the groups, selecting the participants that had responded to the previous question, and some others that I felt would be likely to respond. The question I asked was:

"What is the best idea you have ever had"

Interestingly, the respondents were more inclined to provide a written response to this, rather than linking to online content. The following is one such response:

Two participants responded with single-word answers, which were "travelling" , and "tequila". I also received one video response to this question:

In this case, the participants again did not interact with each other. Those that did respond did not add anything further to the thread.

Melissa- Experiment 1

For my experiment I sent out a series of questions to different groups using Facebook email. By directing the questions to individuals I hoped that they would feel personally obliged to respond. For my first question, I sorted the recipients into groups of ten , based on the following categories:

• International friends
  
• Friends over 30.
  
• Teenage Friends.
  
• Australian university students that have studied abroad.
  

I hoped that by setting these groups apart, it would be easier to see how different demographic factors impacted upon the interpretation of the question, and the way in which the particpants would repsond. I set up the groups with people that all knew each other, hoping that this would encourage them to interact with each other and create discussion threads.

The question I asked was:

"What is the best idea anyone has ever had"

This received very few responses. As many of the groups were people that know each other personally, but do not live near each other, the threads that emerged were conversational and not directed towards answering the question.

This occured particularly in the International friends group, and the conversation seemed to deter participants from responding to the question. One member of this group did not want to disturb the flow of conversation, so responded by posting the following link on my Facebook wall:

The only case of participants responding to each others answers was in the group of Australian university students that have studied abroad. One participant posted the following video:

Another participant then posted a similar video in response to this:

Beyond this, the participants did not interact with each other in answer to the questions, and the response as a whole was underwhelming. The over 30 group did not respond at all, and the teenage group made a couple of jokes.

Interestingly, the participants that did respond tended to post videos and links, rather than providing a written response.

EXPERIMENT 1

Is facebook a good enough medium to gather information, ideas and opinions? Simply put, can facebook serve as a platform to assimilate knowledge?

In order to help answer this question I sent out the following message via the facebook inbox facility to a group of friends, both in the country and over seas.
Sweater Pillow
September 9 at 4:02pm

"Hey!I'm doing a bit of research on collective intelligence and was wondering if you could all spare a wee bit of time from your hectic schedules to answer this question. It doesn't matter if its a simple yes or no, or a giant explanation as to why or why not. Its just a simple experiment.

So heres the question :

Has advances in mobile technology like the Iphone and the Blackberry made it impossible for us to "switch off"? Thanks for your time.

Also, im going to bribe you with chocolate. If you do actually participate, you get yummy chocolate. For any of you weight watchers, I'll buy you a diet coke, or a schooner of Super Dry, whichever you prefer. (I'm living off a student budget)
Thanks!! "

Evidence:

Out of the 20 people I involved in my study, 11 wrote back to me. This shows that although facebook can be an interesting new medium of information gathering, it also has its drawbacks. Although its great scope to involve the intelligence of a wide range of people from different feilds of life, undeniable, facebook is often considered to be more of a recreational social network rather than a space for information assimilation, such as a blog. The credibility of the information that is posted on facebook thus can also pose to be somewhat of an issue. To sum it up...

Conclusion :

The type of response depends on
1. The question
2. The relevance of the question
3. The network

Collective Intelligence and its potential to create a ‘Super Idea’

“One of the Web's basic tenets is that small contributions from lots of people can amount to something powerful in the aggregate” says John D Sutter, from the CNN news network. This is what drives collective intelligence. Emma has outlined what collective intelligence is. Through this post I aim to demonstrate the sheer potential of Collective intelligence.

Like I had mentioned before Google allows us to tap into a vast amount of information through internet searches. Wikipedia allows us access to the expertise of a wide variety of scholars within seconds with just the click of a button. The biggest advantage of collective intelligence is its potential to never stop growing. This is because of the truth that although an expert can participate in a group task as easily as an average person, collective intelligence reflects the group work of a lot of people despite their level of intelligence, and although this may seem to average out, the strategic application of collective intelligence will be able to filter out any of the irrelevant information resulting in the compilation of the best work, no matter where it comes from.

This may sound confusing so here are a few examples that illustrates how the genius of many individuals have come together to form what Mel, Emma and I fondly call a ‘Super Idea’.

"Twitter users are banding together to write an opera for London's Royal Opera house. Bands like My morning Jacket and sour, out of Japan are turning to fans to help film their music videos. Programmers are pulling quotes from social networks to make automated poems. More than 50,000 animators are divvying up work on an upcoming film called "live music" and amateur videographers are re-filming " Star Wars" in 15 second bites" (Sutter. J D, CNN)

Besides this, the website shown to us by our guest lecturer from Google, inbflat.net, features musicians playing different instruments in b flat, and supports a program that allows us to create a melody of our own in b flat using the data submitted by them.

Collective intelligence hence, seems to be a tool that can be used by almost anyone that is even remotely technology savvy, to create a bigger and better picture (again metaphorically speaking). It hands to us the opportunity to create something new and exciting with the help of other individuals with similar interests.

Food for thought:

Who needs IQ, when clearly CI (collective intelligence) has a greater potential.

What Collective Intelligence Can Do For Us

We have decided to create a video that focuses on the concept of ideas and memes. To assist in the generation of ideas we are going to utilise social networking media to build a collective intelligence.

Social networking media has the potential to create an open public forum in which individuals can collaborate on ideas and projects. The online nature of these mediums trancends traditional barriers such as geographic location, facilitating a free flow of communication. This allows many different people to contribute their skills and knowledge to a single project or idea, potentially developing something that none of the contributors could have create alone.

"None of us knows everything; each of us knows something, and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills" - Henry Jenkins

We have chosen to use Facebook to send out a series of questions to different groups of people within our individual networks. Our personal Facebook connections include people of many different ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. We expect that the context of each participant will significantly influence their interpretation of our questions, and we will receive varied, and possibly surprising responses.


We are going to distribute our questions via Facebook email, in an attempt to establish an online collaborative environment. Participants will have the ability to view each other's responses, which may encourage them to interact with each other and build upon each other's ideas. The possible outcomes of this include:

• Participants will connect with each other's ideas and discussion threads will emerge. This could lead to the development of cohesive ideas.
  
• Ideas will evolve through open discussion, which could lead to the development of something new.
  
• Participants may seek involvement from other individuals within their own networks, giving us responses from unexpected sources.
  
• The participants' involvement in the project could generate interest in the finished product. This interest could be from the participants themselves, or from others that they show the finished product to due to their involvement.

Our main objective in doing this is:

• To gain access to knowledge and ideas that we do not already possess.
  
• To motivate individuals from different contexts to collaborate together on the development of ideas.
  
• To generate video content that is shaped by the collective intelligence of our social media connections.
  
• To generate content that is appealing and interesting to a wide variety of people.

How effective can collective intelligence actually be?

The best examples of the success of collective intelligence are of course Wikipedia and Google. Large volumes of information are uploaded by various authors on these websites, eventually to form a collection of detailed information about almost every subject. It is assumed in the publishing industry today that books can only be written by a few authors at once. But Wikkipedia proves that this isn’t the case. Increasingly, the internet has become a platform for authors of all ages and backgrounds to contribute information to a website, which like any other book, is a collection of thoughts, ideas and theories.

One of the problems seen with regard to collective intelligence is that it often leads to a lot of difference in opinion about the information in question. Eventually, individuals in the collective disagree, and start to rock, metaphorically speaking the collective boat

Things get confrontational, and the information put forth is challenged, emotions escalate, and the process becomes alarmingly frigid as people contributing to the collective either are fed up with this disagreement or are infuriated that the credibility of their information has been questioned.

Food for thought:

This brings us to an important question, how can people and computers be connected in a way that the ultimate product of this act of amalgamation is one that acts more intelligently than even a group of individuals or computers have ever done before?

Some Background to Collective Intelligence...

Collective Intelligence is a phenomenon bred by new media. The term alone produces 1.27 million results on Google. Collective intelligence is... groupthink, collaboration, crowd sourcing, community knowledge, wisdom of the crowds, consensus decision making, just to name a few of the trendy media theory terms thrown around. But to define collective intelligence it is fitting that we use Wikipedia, itself an example of the phenomenon. At its most basic: “Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals”.

Now let’s take a quick scan through history to help narrow down our own definition...

Stopping on 1912 and the father of sociology Emile Durkheim we get the first articulations of collective intelligence. Durkheim identified society as the place where wisdom lies, rather than elites which is a crucial power shift. But his concept, called ‘collective consciousness’ is more interested in how individuals all contribute their own ideas to create common ideas which tie a group of people together. The important thing to note is that differing from Durkheim’s theory, collective intelligence doesn’t treat society as some super-organism with the same ideas. Instead the emphasis is on independent individuals and their diversity of thoughts, opinions, ideas. This is what makes up the type of ‘intelligence’ we are focused on.

Next we come to French media scholar and philosopher Pierre Lévy who introduced the concept of collective intelligence as we know it in his 1994 book. Here is a quote from his book ‘L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberespace’.

“What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills… My initial premise is based on the notion of a universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity… New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge”.

These musings by the Frenchman contain an important point, the cornerstone to our definition of collective intelligence: “No one knows everything, everyone knows something.” Opening up the opportunity to contribute and create to everyone means a wider knowledge pool and in theory, better knowledge. Lévy also hints to something which is very important in the next phase of our definition: “new communications systems”, which are essentially online, internet-based ways of enabling us to share our intelligence with each other. He refers to a “knowledge space” which emerges as a kind of melting pot for all the intelligence, which is largely online.

Fast forward a few decades and we get American media theorist Henry Jenkins’ updated idea on collective intelligence. Jenkins’ emphasis is on a ‘participatory culture’ and ‘interactivity’ as the building blocks of collective intelligence. It is all about using the ‘We’ in Web. It is about rejecting the idea that the media transmits things to us as passive consumers, instead we, the ordinary people, are active creators and producers of content.

So, collective intelligence uses a wide variety of ideas from the active contributions of ordinary people in society to create something better than if it were made by only a select few.