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Kate Namestnik

The Wisdom of Crowds - 26 views

Net308_508 Collaboration organisation kony 2012 social media wise crowd wisdom of the crowds

started by Kate Namestnik on 24 Mar 12
  • Kate Namestnik
    #1 Kate Namestnik on 24 Mar 12
     
    Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of the Crowds. United States. Doubleday; Anchor. (http://www.icepredict.com/rsrc/files/wisdomofcrowds.pdf)

    Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki


    This article explores how collaboration occurs through crowd wisdom, identifies specifically what makes a good 'wise crowd' or a bad 'wise crowd', and importantly pin points how disorganised decisions are more accurate in a group situation than an organised decision.

    Surowiecki highlights the important difference between the Wisdom of the Crowds concept (p5), in which people must be unrelated, independent, and have diversity of mind from one another to form opinions, to a groupthink situation in which people "increasingly make decisions based on influence of one another".

    The recent Kony 2012 campaign created by the Invisible Children relied entirely on the collaboration culture to spread information and raise awareness of the issue of Joseph Kony and his criminal actions. The combined audience has given power to crowds allowing mass self-expression through collaboration on social platforms, as individuals engage with the campaign and create content in relation to raised issues.
    Audiences have had either one of two reactions to the campaign: positive or negative. Due to the nature of social networks such as Facebook, one of the major platforms that aided the rise of the Kony 2012 campaign, what information each user consumes is mediated by other users. Individuals on Facebook who have 'friends' often know one another and have a similar frame of mind which leads to organised and influenced decisions. These decisions are deemed less accurate by Surowiecki who categorises this audience as a bad example of a wise crowd.

    To date, the Kony 2012 campaign has attained a favourable and collective biased opinion; one that has been formulated and circulated via online social networking sites. Information circulated online about Kony 2012 is remediated by individuals who place their own opinions into the campaign.
  • Sian Cooper
    #2 Sian Cooper on 05 Apr 12
     
    This is a nice review of James Surowiecki's publication of The Wisdom of the Crowds, as reviewed by just that- 'the crowds' on Wikipedia. Since his publication in 2004, the term "wisdom of the crowds" has been used in many research papers and articles, especially when in reference to collaboration and knowledge contribution in various Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia. Similarly, the publications I have selected incorporate this theory and extend it into the practices of education (Grossek, 2009) and businesses/corporations (Hasan & Pfaff, 2006; Hendrix & Johannsen, 2008).

    For example, Hendrix and Johannsen (2008) discuss the Shell wiki and how it was used to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst employees, leading to the production of a nine-volume "Shell exploration and production handbook". Thus here we see employees dispersed geographically collaborating and sharing knowledge to achieve a common goal. We are now beginning to see just how powerful a diverse range of opinions from a wide range of people can be when working towards a common goal. Whether it is a group project, or designing a company workbook, two heads are better than one.

    Overall this article is a nice representation discussing the main points of Surowiecki's work, and it is interesting to see how the 'Wisdom of the Crowds' theoretical framework can be applied to various aspects of today's Web 2.0 technologies.

    Additional References:

    Grossek, G. (2009). To use or not to use web 2.0 in higher education? Procedia Social and Behavioural Sciences. Pp478-482. Retrieved 21st March 2012 from http://webpages.csus.edu/~sac43949/pdfs/to%20use%20or%20not%20to%20use.pdf

    Hasan, H., & Pfaff, C.C. (2006). The wiki: an environment to revolutionise employees' interaction with corporate knowledge. OZCHI. 11(24-26). Pp377-380. Retrieved 19th March 2012 from http://www.ozchi.org/proceedings/2006/sessions/short-papers/social/hasan-p377.pdf

    Hendrix, D., & Johannsen, G. (May 16th, 2008). A knowledge sharing and collaboration platform. Inside Knowledge. 11(8). Retrieved 20th March 2012 from http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/sid.0/articleid.0A6EF1DD-1D6A-4CD0-94EA-DC872A5A708E/eTitle.Case_study_Shell_Wiki/qx/display.htm
  • Tamlin Dobrich
    #4 Tamlin Dobrich on 05 Apr 12
     
    I found this article very interesting as it highlights circumstances when the wisdom of crowds may be beneficial, other circumstances when it is not useful and examples of situations where it should have been used and was not.

    An interesting point that the article discusses is that not all crowds are wise and in fact, crowds such as mobs and stock market bubbles may create negative outcomes (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2010).
    The article suggests that in order to successfully utilize the wisdom of crowds, individuals of a group must be diverse of opinion, independent, decentralized and have some method to combine these independent ideas (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2010).

    I was surprised to see the article referenced Wikipedia as a bad example for the wisdom of crowds suggesting "subject matter experts can be overruled and even wrongly punished by less knowledgeable persons in systems like Wikipedia" which "have less well defined means of pooling knowledge" (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2010).

    In most of my own research I found articles that in some way supported Wikipedia's use of crowd wisdom. For example "The More, The Wikier" and "Wikipedia: Organisation from a Bottom-up Approach" suggest that Wikipedia does in fact successfully utilizes the wisdom of crowds through a large and diverse author base utilizing a system of bottom-up organisation.

    Overall I found the article was a good overview of the wisdom of crowds.

    Reference:

    Ball, P. (2007, February 27). The more, the wikier. Nature: International weekly journal of Science. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com

    Jaap van den Herik, H., Postma, E., & Spek, S. (2006). Wikipedia: organisation from a bottom-up approach. Maastricht University. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0611068v2.pdf

    The Wisdom of Crowds. (2010). Received from http://www.icepredict.com/rsrc/files/wisdomofcrowds.pdf
  • Mitchell Houwen
    #5 Mitchell Houwen on 07 Apr 12
     
    With the 'Wisdom of Crowds' coming in so many variations it is important to understand how things are categorized. The advantages that are produced from 'Wisdom of Crowds', Surowiecki categorises as cognition, coordination and cooperation. Wikipedia itself has all these advantages from which to choose from, firstly cognition. The information processing stage of Wikipedia occurs as the article is written. With several mediators there is more chance for the information to be entered and edited correctly which results in far more succinct information. Coordination indicates the trust that people have in the people that are partaking in the editing process of the articles. Networks are formed throughout Wikipedia as people are brought together with common interests which exceed the limitations of Wikipedia. Also to form a wise crowd you need diverse opinions, independent opinions, decentralization and aggregation. All four of these factors are found in the Wikipedia medium. People are of course coming from across the globe so opinions are diverse. People do not actual know each other so their confidence to share their opinion is amplified. Does this mean however that all the voices in the article become one unified information front? Collaboration allows many different individuals to voice their opinion and this is why Wikipedia is the perfect version of 'Wisdom of Crowds'.
  • Jarrad Long
    #6 Jarrad Long on 08 Apr 12
     
    This Wikipedia article presents a summary of the 2004 book of the same name by New York Journalist James Surowiecki. Initially it explains Surowiecki's ideas about how crowd intelligence works and his musings on why crowd intelligence sometimes fails, but the part I find most interesting and most relevant to my essay topic on mobile crowd-sourcing is the section dealing with the use of crowd intelligence to make predictions about the future.

    Previous articles I've read about crowd-sourcing describe applications that seek to provide more insight about present conditions (for example, noise-mapping, road condition monitoring and invasive plant tracking) but this article states that Surowiecki's book focuses entirely on the predictive applications of crowd-sourcing. The betting market and the stock market are described as arenas where crowd intelligence is used to make predictions. The article goes on to state "A number of Web-based quasi-prediction marketplace companies have sprung up to offer predictions primarily on sporting events and stock markets but also other topics. Those companies include Piqqem, Cake Financial, Covestor, Predictify and the Motley Fool". Whilst it isn't actually stated, the suggestion is that these companies all use some form of crowd-sourcing to make their predictions.

    The accurate prediction of future events is, in my opinion, an area of incredible potential. If mobile devices can effectively facilitate crowd-sourcing for predictions, and those predictions are proven highly accurate, one can imagine it having a massive influence on government, business, military and environmental sustainability. This is an application of crowd-sourcing I'm keen to explore further.

    The Wisdom of Crowds (2012). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 1 April, from http://www.icepredict.com/rsrc/files/wisdomofcrowds.pdf

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