Resources and Links Related to Crowds
This is the zone of the market place (or bazaar), the digital on-line environments, and spontaneously forming crowds. It’s not really a new space. Markets have existed for millennia. While there is often an entity (often formed of traders themselves) that monitors the trading and exchanges and sets some basic rules, these rules are nearly all enablers so that the spontaneous interaction of agents exchanging value with one another can proceed without confusion or unnecessary impediment.
Collaborative work in this arena is characterized by more and more control shifting to agents, or the individual participants, while digital tools and simple rules serve as enablers and connectors. The Internet-based versions of this zone let people work together on projects from a distance (remote) and at their convenience instead of all at the same time (asynchronous). Events take on a more fluid and discontinuous feel.
What follows are links to resources and additional information about Crowds.
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Theory
Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Historically, because large groups of people have been able to affect dramatic and sudden social change in a manner that bypasses established due process, they have also provoked controversy. Social scientists have developed several different theories for explaining crowd psychology, and the ways in which the psychology of the crowd differs significantly from the psychology of those individuals within it. Carl Jung coined the notion of the Collective unconscious. Other major thinkers of crowd psychology include Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During Groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance. The term is frequently used pejoratively, with hindsight.
Using Games to Tap Collective Intelligence: I’ve been mulling over an idea for several months now. It goes something like this: Nowadays, everyone is talking about the broad potential applications of video games. Combating obesity. Managing chronic disease. General education. Employee training. Military preparedness and recruiting. The list seems endless. But one unique and important aspect of games has yet to be tapped: I believe they can effectively aggregate individual players’ actions into a form of collective intelligence.
What Is Crowdsourcing?
Despite the jargony name, crowdsourcing is a very real and important business idea. Definitions and terms vary, but the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. Yet free labor is only a narrow part of crowdsourcing's appeal. More importantly, it enables managers to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want.
Innocentive: Crowdsourcing Diversity
What starts with the crowd ends in research and development
Alpheus Bingham knew something big had to shift in the way invention and innovation happened at pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly. A top R&D executive at Lilly in the mid 1990s, Bingham, along with others, struggled to devise new ways to leverage knowledge to reduce the ridiculously high costs of developing new medicines.
Explaining the Wisdom of Crowds: Applying the Logic of Diversity
Understanding diversity and leveraging its potential requires deeper understanding than we currently possess. We won’t get far with compelling anecdotes and metaphors . . . We need a logic of diversity.
Diverse Perspectives - How we See Things
We all differ in how we see and interpret things. Whether considering a politician’s proposal for changes in welfare policy, a new front-loading washing machine, or an antique ceramic bowl, each of us uses a different representation. Each of us sees the thing, whatever it is, in our own way. We commonly refer to the ways we encode things as perspectives. But if asked what a perspective is, most of us would have only a crude idea. In this chapter I provide a formal definition, but before I get to that I’ll present an example of a famous perspective: the periodic table.
CrowdSourcing
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.
The Rise of Crowdsourcing: Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.
Threadless.com: This hipster company prints T-shirts with designs submitted to its Web site. It expects to earn $20 million in revenue this year.
John Fluevog Shoes: The maker of chunky, funky shoes has started Open Source Footwear. Fluevog fanatics submit their own designs for shoes. So far 10 are in production.
Zazzle: This site takes user designs and plasters them on mugs, shirts, and posters. If other Zazzlers like your work and order products with your design, you get a cut.
Lego: The beloved toy company encourages its fanatical customers to design everything from robot operating systems to Lego sets.
