IS3321 Information Systems Solutions
for the Digital Enterprise
Lecture 4: The Wisdom of Crowds and
Introduction to Crowdsourcing
Rob Gleasure
R.Gleasure@ucc.ie
robgleasure.com
IS3321
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Last session
 Outsourcing
 Advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing
 Virtual teams
 Advantages and disadvantages of virtual teams
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This session
 The Wisdom of Crowds
 Crowdsourcing
A Game (Yay!)
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How many metres do you think it is from the front gates of UCC to
the traffic lights at the end of the road (in front of what used to be the
cinema)
You should guess in distance ‘as the crow flies’, i.e. if you could take
a straight line from one to the other
Don’t confer, it ruins the fun
Some History
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Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a very
successful and established statistician
and psychologist
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He was a strong believe in the genetic
predisposition for greatness, his most
famous work being Hereditary
Greatness (he also coined the phrase
‘nature vs. nurture’)
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Much of his work focused on eugenics
(breeding out the characteristics of
people he deemed less valuable)
Image from http://apuntesdedemografia.com/polpob/1043-2/francis-galton/
One Day…
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In 1906 Galton was at a fair when he came upon a contest asking
individuals to guess the weight of the meat on an ox
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Galton saw the data from the guesses as an opportunity to
demonstrate the futility of democracy, as he believed that experts
(e.g. butchers) would get very close, while the public would be miles
off
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The mean median guess was 1,207 and the mean was 1,197lb
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The correct number was 1,198
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The crowd as a whole were closer than any individual experts
The Wisdom of Crowds
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James Surowiecki (2004) used Galton’s story as a jumping off point
to coin the term ‘wisdom of crowds’
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The wisdom of crowds does not describe a collective interdependent
form of cognition, instead it describes the aggregation and
consolidation of cognition by independently-minded individuals
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This allows individual biases and skewed personal experiences to
be averaged out
The Wisdom of Crowds
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Surowiecki argues there are basically three types of crowd wisdom
1.
Crowd cognition
 Experts, non-experts, and individuals with varying experiences
may use different biases and reference points to solve some
mental problem
 Statistically, this means that they are each prone to different
errors
 Taken together, these errors average and cancel out one another
The Wisdom of Crowds
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Surowiecki argues there are basically three types of crowd wisdom
2.
Crowd coordination
 Individuals in a crowd typically use less thorough analysis than
they might if solving a problem individually, e.g. if you were solely
and personally responsible for selecting your TDs, you would
probably spend more time thinking about it than you do now
 This means individual behaviour is faster, more dynamic, and
more responsive
 Less need for upfront planning and top-down control
The Wisdom of Crowds
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Surowiecki argues there are basically three types of crowd wisdom
3.
Crowd cooperation
 Individuals are more free to establish trust when there is no
hierarchy dictating them terms
 Individuals can self-organise to interact with those whom they
feel most connection
 Emergent standards and repeated processes fill the void when
structure is absent, e.g. 4Chan
Wise Crowds vs Groupthink
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Surowiecki also notes that not all crowds are wise, irrationality
snowballs in some crowds, e.g. stock market bubbles
 Wise crowds have 4 characteristics
1.
Diversity of Opinion
 Creativity demands diversity, if an individual is not viewing the
problem in a way that is somehow different their contribution is
minimal
2.
Independence of Opinion
 Diversity is stiffed if individuals feel pressured to conform or
experts create a culture of graded respect
Wise Crowds vs Groupthink
(continued)
3.
Decentralisation
 People with specialised skills or knowledge are allowed to draw
on those skills or knowledge
 Diversity becomes decreasingly useful if certain portions of the
crowd are ignored
4.
Aggregation
 Information cascades result if decisions are made in sequence,
as individuals gravitate towards existing opinions
 Intelligence needs to be gathered privately, then combined
Signs of Groupthink
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A move towards groupthink from crowd wisdom usually manifest
several warning signs
 Little discussion of alternatives
 Little discussion of risk
 Little information search
 Little discussion of contingency
 The same people dominate discussions
Crowdsourcing
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“Crowdsourcing” is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by
a designated agent (such as an employee or a contractor) and
outsourcing it by making an open call to an undefined but large
group of people (Howe 2008)
This phenomena is attributed to four developments in recent history
 A renaissance of amateurism
 The open source software movement (we’ll talk about this next
session)
 Increasing availability of production tools
 Rise of communities around specific interests
Crowdsourcing
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Crowdsourcing is being applied to roughly four different areas
 Collective Intelligence (e.g. prediction, large-scale problemsolving, brainstorming)
 Production of mass creative works
 Filtering and organising of information
 Crowdfunding
Sometimes, it’s about teamwork
Image from http://1000funnypictures.com/funny-animals-v/watch-out-its-a-trap-funny-animals/
Others, it’s about the right individual
Image from http://themetapicture.com/he-really-came-prepared/
Our Distance-Guessing Game
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Are we a wise crowd?
 Independence
 Decentralisation
 Aggregation
 Diversity
 Numbers
Google maps says the distance was…
978
Readings
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Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are
smarter than the few. London: Abacus.
Dalton’s description of his ‘Vox Populi’ findings in Nature
 http://wisdomofcrowds.blogspot.ie/2009/12/vox-populi-sir-francisgalton.html
Howe, J. (2008). Crowdsourcing: How the power of the crowd is
driving the future of business. Random House.