Abstract
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a method to draw on the intellectual skills of large numbers of people. The text reviews such past work, and then asks questions and makes general proposals about moving towards more powerful means of large scale collaboration: moving from Crowdsourcing to “Distributed Thinking”.
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Notes
- 1.
Possibly of interest: see article in this volume by Jordan Crouser and Remco Change, discussing relative strengths of humans vs computers.
- 2.
Possibly of interest: See article in this volume on crowdsourcing disaster relief by Ushahidi founder Patrick Meier. Human Computation for Disaster Response.
- 3.
ESP game is an exception here; sort of.
- 4.
A notable exception is FoldIt: In the case of FoldIt, it turned out that a public participant was unusually good at the task, better than subject area experts. This fact alone highlights the sophistication of that project. I.e., FoldIt serves to demonstrate the example that when projects are sufficiently advanced, they may draw in “savants”, persons unusually good at the particular task—better in some cases than the project organizers themselves. And/or, projects may empower novel combinations of intellectual skills of persons otherwise unknown the project organizers.
- 5.
A small but important step in the evolution from current-generation Crowdsourcing to Distributed Thinking would be adoption of a standard means to integrate individual projects (individual functions) into more complex workflows. It is hoped that developers of such projects—and especially developers of middleware like BOSSA and PyBOSSA—will provide APIs that enable others to submit inputs and collect outputs, so the output of one project might be used as the input for another. For instance, a Phylo-style DNA project might input sequences into a FoldIt style structure prediction application.
- 6.
Of course there are numerous technical reasons why these steps are incomplete or may be impractical or infeasible at the moment. As noted it is a speculative example, a broad-stroke illustration.
References
Minsky M (1988) The society of mind. Simon and Schuster, New York. ISBN 0-671-65713-5
Websites
Clickworkers: Originally http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top. Later revised to http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/hirise. Current version: http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/welcome
Stardust@home: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
Galaxy Zoo: www.galaxyzoo.org
ESP Game: originally: http://www.espgame.org; subsequently included in images.google.com
Ushahidi: www.ushahidi.com
eBird: ebird.org
Iowa Electronic Markets—tippie.uiowa.edu/iem
FoldIt—fold.it
Phylo—phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/eng
EteRNA—eterna.cmu.edu/
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Blumberg, M. (2013). Patterns of Connection. In: Michelucci, P. (eds) Handbook of Human Computation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8806-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8806-4_2
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