Handbook for Collective Intelligence

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Marcos Bompart

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Handbook for Collective Intelligence

From MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Welcome to the Handbook of Collective Intelligence!

Terms and conditions. Please see following section on using and contributing to this handbook .

This Handbook provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research.

The handbook is structured as a wiki, a collection of on-line pages, editable by their readers.

The handbook is hosted by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, but we hope that researchers and others from around the world will contribute to it. The process of creating this handbook could itself be an example of collective intelligence.

In parallel with this Wiki, we are developing a database of bibliographic references at citeUlike. The wikis here link to these references at citeUlike.

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Goals

Unlike Wikipedia (an encyclopedia created by many people editing a wiki), this handbook is not structured as a "flat" collection of interlinked, but conceptually independent, short articles. Instead, this handbook is intended to provide a conceptual framework for the whole field of collective intelligence.

We hope that the top level of this framework will be written in a way that is understandable to a very broad general audience. At many points in this framework, however, we expect to have links to separate pages that elaborate on specific points or issues. Often, these separate pages will include specialized material and references for one or more of the many different fields related to collective intelligence. Even though some of this specialized material may be understandable only by specialists, it should be introduced so that other readers will at least be able to understand the basic issues involved.

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Using and contributing to this handbook

Participation in the Handbook of Collective Intelligence is completely voluntary and participation will be subject to terms and conditions that will be added at a later date.

Thank you for your participation in this very exciting and groundbreaking project

Please bear in mind we expect to experiment with several different approaches to creating this Handbook.

This work is licensed under a "Creative Commons License"< http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/>.

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Why study collective intelligence now?

Collective intelligence has existed for at least as long as humans have. Tribes of hunter-gatherers, nations, and modern corporations all act collectively with varying degrees of intelligence.And, from some perspectives, even collections of bacteria, bees, or baboons can also be viewed as collectively intelligent (e.g., Bloom 1995).

But this ancient phenomenon is now occurring in dramatically new forms. With new communication technologies—especially the Internet—huge numbers of people all over the planet can now work together in ways that were never before possible in the history of humanity (e.g., Malone 2004). It is thus more important than ever for us to understand collective intelligence at a deep level so we can create and take advantage of these new possibilities.

This document tries to help in that process by organizing what we already know and identifying what we don't.

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What is collective intelligence?

Our current working definition of collective intelligence is: Groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent. Details here.

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Examples of collective intelligence

Details here.

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What factors facilitate collective intelligence?

Under development.

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What factors inhibit collective intelligence?

Under development.

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Measuring collective intelligence and the factors that affect it

Under development.

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Perspectives on collective intelligence

One way to integrate the different perspectives on collective intelligence is to identify the:

commonalities: how each maps onto the generic components (see Components ) common in collective intelligence, and
discipline-specific contributions: what are the key relevant concepts and theories.

Hopefully, the commonalities spur deeper thinking about the foundations of collective intelligence, and the discipline-specific contributions suggest cross-fertilization of ideas across disciplines.

The following table provides examples from each perspective:

Perspective	Actors	Resources	Actions and their bases	Results	Evaluation and measures	Factors enhancing CI	Factors inhibiting CI	Techniques for enhancing CI
Sociology	Humans	Status, power	Persuasion, conformity	Motivation, learning, conflict	Experiments, sociometry	-	-	-
Neoclassical economics	Firms, consumers	Wealth, goods	Trade, pricing, incentives	Efficiency, monopolistic power	Welfare, monetary units	-	Arrow's impossibility theorems, information asymmetry, contractual incompleteness, Prisoner's dilemma	-
Economic sociology	Humans and organizations	Trust, identity, organizational demography	Relationships as contraints	Node-level profitability, mortality	Profits, hazard rates	Diversity	Strong ties	Brokerage over weak ties
Artificial intelligence	Computer agents	Knowledge, computational power	Problem-solving, theorem-proving	Problem solutions, proofs	Turing test	Connectionism	-	-
Cognitive neuroscience	Neurons, codons	Weight of connections	Neural firing	Mental representations, mind-body problem	Two-photon microscopy, calcium imaging	-	-	-
Computer networks	Computers	Computational cycles, storage	Computation	Computational solutions	Speed and accuracy of results, transmissions	-	Byzantine Failure, impossibility of distributed consensus	-
Political philosophy	Humans	Status, power	Decision-making	Motivation, learning, conflict	Experiments, sociometry	-	-	-

In addition to the above discipline-specific perspectives, some other perspectives have multi-disciplinary origins, but are becoming perspectives in their own right, and we list them here:

Perspective	Actors	Resources	Actions and their bases	Results	Evaluation and measures	Factors enhancing CI	Factors inhibiting CI	Techniques for enhancing CI
Social psychology	Humans	Status, power	Persuasion, conformity	Motivation, learning, conflict	Experiments, sociometry	-	-	-
Prediction markets	Humans	Information, money	Votes	Voting result	Count of votes, variances	-	-	-