Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence

By Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, Chrysanthos Dellarocas. 2009

587 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence. Examples include Google, Wikipedia, Threadless, and many others. To take advantage of the possibilities these new systems represent, it is necessary to go beyond just seeing them as a fuzzy collection of "cool" ideas. What is needed is a deeper understanding of how these systems work. This article offers a new framework to help provide that understanding. It identifies the underlying building blocks - to use a biological metaphor, the "genes" - at the heart of collective intelligence systems. These genes are defined by the answers to two pairs of key questions: - Who is performing the task? Why are they doing it? - What is being accomplished? How is it being done? The paper goes on to list the genes of collective intelligence - the possible answers to these key questions - and shows how combinations of genes comprise a "genome" that characterizes each collective intelligence system. In addition, the paper describes the conditions under which each gene is useful and the possibilities for combining and re-combining these genes to harness crowds effectively. Using this framework, managers can systematically consider many possible combinations of genes as they seek to develop new collective intelligence systems.

Subfields: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c1f8f760e7442ae880eec5e7ae1490444e8c91e

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In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Human computation: a survey and taxonomy of a growing field (2011, background): “Today, the field of human computation is being advanced by researchers from areas as diverse as artificial intelligence [35,38,58], business [41,56,29,72], cryptography [64], art [16,31], genetic algorithms [32], and HCI [2,3,5,etc.”
Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace (2010, background): “By December 2008, 11% of Americans had posted to a microblogging site (Lenhart and Fox 2009) and by August 2009 there were over 32 million people on Twitter (McIntyre 2009).”
Evaluation on crowdsourcing research: Current status and future direction (2012, background): “…be created independently (e.g. cases in idea competition or design contest) or collaboratively (e.g. cases in Wikipedia or citizen science); while in open source, the crowds usually work together to create something, and important dependencies exist between their contributions (Malone et al. 2010).”
Quality management on Amazon Mechanical Turk (2010, background): “Quality Management on Amazon Mechanical Turk Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis Foster Provost Jing Wang panos@stern.nyu.edu fprovost@stern.nyu.edu jwang5@stern.nyu.edu Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University ABSTRACT…”
Co-Creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective (2010, background): “Partial classifications of some of the factors included in co-creation are available as Web-accessible documents [24, 72].”
Beyond New and Appropriate: Who Decides What Is Creative? (2012, background): “Malone, Laubacher, and Dellarocas (2009) suggested a hierarchical model is often employed, in which novices may vote, but their results are screened (or used in a consultative manner) by experts who then make the actual decisions.”
From participatory sensing to Mobile Crowd Sensing (2014, background): “…of MCS, and explain the evolution from participatory sensing to MCS;  Clarify the technical foundation of MCS — the optimal fusion of human and machine intelligence, and present the key research issues of MCS;  Propose a reference framework of MCS and discuss the future research trends.”
Wiktionary: a new rival for expert-built lexicons? Exploring the possibilities of collaborative lexicography (2012, background): “These resources represent the sum of the opinions of many authors, often known as their collective intelligence or as the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ phenomenon (Surowiecki, 2005; Malone et al., 2010).”
Financial incentives and the "performance of crowds" (2010, unknown): “Research 111 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018 +1 (212) 571-8124 winteram@yahoo-inc.com ABSTRACT The relationship between financial incentives and performance, long of interest to social scientists, has gained new relevance with the advent of web-based crowd-sourcing models of production.”
Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing (2015, background): “Interest and entertainment are also important motivators in many situations, even when there is no prospect of monetary gain [Malone et al. 2009].”