Collective Intelligence
Mi Gao & Sandra Rivera______

Collective intelligence:
concept and implications
Here comes everybody
The cult of the amateur

“Intelligence” and “Collective”
Intelligence Collective
the “capability of a system defined as “of, relating to,
to adapt its behavior to characteristic of, or made
meet its goals in a range of by a number of people
environments” acting as a group”
(Fogel,1995, p. 22) (American Heritage Dictionary)
“the ability to solve hard
problems”
(Minsky, 1985)

What is collective
intelligence?

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Current Working Definition:
Groups of individuals doing
things collectively that seem
intelligent.

Question
How about beehives and ant colonies are examples of
groups of insects doing things like finding food sources
that seem intelligent ?
Could we even view a single human brain as a collection
of individual neurons or parts of the brain that
collectively act intelligently ?

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Further Definition:
Collective Intelligence relies upon the individual
knowledge, creativity, and identity of its constituent
parts, and emerges from a synergy between them. In
its highest forms, participating in collective
intelligence can actually help people self-actualize
while solving collective problems.

Wikipedia
Collective intelligence has been defined as a
“shared or group intelligence that emerges
from the collaboration and competition of
many individuals. Collective intelligence
appears in a wide variety of forms of
consensus decision making in bacteria,
animals, humans, and computer networks”.

Levy’s definition
“It is a form of universally distributed
intelligence, constantly enhanced,
coordinated in real time, and resulting in
the effective mobilization of skills.
(1997, p. 13)

Levy’s Definition
indispensable characteristic
The basis and goal of collective intelligence is
the mutual reorganization and
enrichment of individuals rather than the
cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities
(1997, p. 13).

Identifiers of Collective intelligence
a group of actors
a set of resources available to those actors
a set of actions that the actors take
the collective results of the actions
a way of evaluating the result

Question
Some people, when they hear the term “collective
intelligence” assume that it implies individuals giving up
their individuality to be somehow subsumed in a group.
What do you think about this opinion ?

Which factors inhibit collective intelligence ?
Groupthink and
Informational Cascades
Social Dilemmas
Coordination Failures

Groupthink and Informational Cascades
Whole turns to be less than the sum of the parts because
only some parts are actually contributing while
everyone else imitates or conforms.
Remedy: mechanisms that foster diversity and
independence might improve collective intelligence.

Social Dilemmas
Whole turns to be less than the sum of the parts because
some parts contribute and the others slack off.
Remedy: Incentives must be carefully structured to
reward individual participation as well as collective
intelligence.

Coordination Failures
Whole turns to be less than the sum of the parts
because the parts’ contributions interfere with or cancel
each other.
Remedy: evolving structures and practices that
coordinate individual contribution
(Al-Hakim & Memmola, 2008 )

Participation

Question
Why do people take part in the activity?
What motivates them to participate ?
What incentives are at work?

Human Motivation
Money
Love
• 1) intrinsic enjoyment of an activity
• 2) socializing with others
• 3) contributing to a cause
Glory
(Malone, Laubacher, and Dellarocas, 2009)

Here comes everybody:
the power of organizing without organizations
Clay Shirky
• consultant on Internet technologies
• Professor in New York University

Here comes everybody
Group action
just got easier”

Here comes everybody
3. Collective
action
2. Cooperation
1. Sharing

Stages in formation of groups: sharing

Stages in formation of groups: cooperation

Stages in formation of groups: collective action

Stages in formation of groups: collective action

Stages in formation of groups: collective action
“ Revolution doesn’t happen when
society adopts new technologies,
it happens when society adopt
new behaviors”
(Shirky, 2008, p. 160)

The cult of the amateur: how blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the
rest of today's user generated media are killing our culture and economy
Andrew Keen
• Internet entrepreneur
• executive at several Silicon Valley
based technology start-ups

The cult of the amateur
“
noble amateur”:
“
the heart of Web 2.0’s cultural revolution and threatens to
turn our intellectual traditions and institutions upside down.
In one sense, it is a digitalized version of Rousseau’s noble
savage, representing the triumph of innocence over
experience, of romanticism over the commonsense wisdom
of the Enlightenment”
(Keen, 2008, p. 36)

The cult of the amateur
• has entries “none of them edited
Wikipedia or vetted for accuracy.”

“
Our goal is to capture the full range of humanity's various understandings and
knowledge of reality, and thereby to paint a maximally broad and detailed
portrait of our universe as accurately as living humans understand it. We also
expect our approved articles to be, in the long run, as authoritative, error-free,
and well-written as encyclopedia articles are expected to be”

Wikipedia Citizendium
Year of creation 2001 2006 (pilot)
2007 (public)
Creators Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Platform Media Wiki Media Wiki
URL www.wikipedia.org www.citizendium.org
Languages 260 1 (English)
Articles in English 3,058,844 12,338
Popularity in internet 6 52,387
(Alexa)
Registered users 10,727,792 2,100 (2007)

Shirky into social media
Internet has native support for groups and
conversation at the same time
All media gets digitized, Internet becomes
the mode of carriage for all other media
Media where the audience not only
consumes media, but also produces it
(Shirky, 2009)

Which model do you prefer, Wikipedia or
Citizendium ?
How valuable is the content generated in social
web ?
Do we need gatekeepers to monitor the
production or the quality of contents found in
social media?

References
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•LÉVY, P., - 1997. Intelligence collective. English
•Collective intelligence : mankind's emerging world in cyberspace / Pierre Lévy ; translated from French by Robert Bononno, New
York :, Plenum Trade.
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•MALONE, T., LAUBACHER, R. & DELLAROCAS, C. 2009. Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence [Online].
Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Available: http://cci.mit.edu/publications/CCIwp2009-01.pdf [Accessed 2
October 2009].
•MALONE, T. W. 2006. What is collective intelligence and what will we do about it? [Online]. MIT. Center for Collective Intelligence.
Available: http://cci.mit.edu/about/MaloneLaunchRemarks.html [Accessed 2 October 2009].
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•SHIRKY, C. 2009. Talks Clay Shirky: How social media can make history [Online]. TED Talks. Available:
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