The Biz of Coding

MIT launches Center for Collective Intelligence

by Ujwal Tickoo on October 17th, 2006

When Collective Intelligence powers Search within a closed or open community it shows up in products like Delicious and MyWeb. When it helps people find answers to questions from others it shows up in Yahoo Answers. When Collective Intelligence tries to form an accessible, free encylcopedia — it shows up in Wikipedia.

Collective Intelligence pervades our online experiences today. The Internet and Web have been important enablers for Collective Intelligence – helping people come together in virtual space and collaborate easily for building software, encylopedia, and search engines.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, has recognized the rise of collective activity of individuals (supported by the Internet and WWW) and started a Center For Collective Intelligence.

The center was launched on October 13th. Jimmi Wales the founder of Wikipedia is quite appropriately on the Advisory Board of MIT’s CCI. Wikipedia, the Blogosphere, Yahoo Answers, Digg, Fark, Delicious, Yahoo! MyWeb and the Open Source Movement are all examples of Collective Intelligence.

MIT CCI has also started an online Handbook of Collective Intelligence — a wiki/Social Text site where people can contribute to ideas on Collective Intelligence. 

The MIT website explains its goals:

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like…Wikipedia suggest…time is now ripe for many more such systems.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

One common criticism of Collective Intelligence has been that it sometimes promote "popular views" and therefore encourages mediocritiy. Those views that don’t get understood by the average people in crowds but might be more accurate would get drowned in the noise of democratic thinking. As I had mulled in my post Web 2.0 Soical Search — Wisdom v/s Stupidity of Crowds; Nicholals Carr warned about the possibility of collective intelligence turning into collective stupidity in in his blog post Web 2.0’s Numbskull Factor:

Although wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms for the creation of content are often described in purely egalitarian terms - as the products of communities of equals - that’s just a utopian fantasy. In fact, the quality of the product hinges not just, or even primarily, on the number of contributors. It also hinges on the talent of the contributors - or, more accurately, on the talent of every individual contributor. No matter how vast, a community of mediocrities will never be able to produce anything better than mediocre work.

…A relatively few people hold a relatively large portion of the smarts, the expertise, the contacts, the political savvy and so on. Getting those people - the meritocratic elite - to contribute to a collaboration platform is a big challenge facing Web 2.0…

POSTED IN: Blogosphere, Social Networks, Social Search, Web 2.0, Wikipedia