Harvesting Wisdom on Social Media for Business Decision Making

The proliferation of social media provides significant opportunities for organizations to obtain wisdom of the crowds (WOC)-type data for decision making. However, critical challenges associated with collecting such data exist. For example, the openness of social media tends to increase the possibility of social influence, which may diminish group diversity, one of the conditions of WOC. In this research-in-progress paper, a new social media data analytics framework is proposed. It is equipped with well-designed mechanisms (e.g., using different discussion processes to overcome social influence issues and boost social learning) to generate data and employs state-of-the-art big data technologies, e.g., Amazon EMR, for data processing and storage. Design science research methodology is used to develop the framework. This paper contributes to the WOC and social media adoption literature by providing a practical approach for organizations to effectively generate WOC-type data from social media to support their decision making

Why contests improve philanthropy

Knight Foundation has supported nearly a dozen open contests, reviewed almost 25,000 applications and chosen more than 400 winning ideas. This report discusses what the Foundation has learnt from this experience about how good contests work, what they can do, and what the challenges are

Economic resilience and crowdsourcing platforms

The increased interdependence and complexity of modern societies have increased the need to involve all members of a community into solving problems. In times of great uncertainty, when communities face threats of different kinds and magnitudes, the traditional top-down approach where government provides solely for community wellbeing is no longer plausible. Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective means of empowering communities with the potential to engage individuals in innovation, self-organization activities, informal learning, mutual support, and political action that can all lead to resilience. However, there remains limited resource on the topic. In this paper, we outline the various forms of crowdsourcing, economic and community resilience, crowdsourcing and economic resilience, and a case study of the Nepal earthquake. his article presents an exploratory perspective on the link can be found between crowdsourcing and economic resilience. It introduces and describes a framework that can be used to study the impact of crowdsourcing initiatives for economic resilience by future research. An initial a set of indicators to be used to measure the change in the level of resilience is presented.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Investigation of Governance Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing Initiatives

Crowdsourcing has increasingly become a recognized sourcing mechanism for problem-solving in organizations by outsourcing the problem to an undefined entity or the ‘crowd’. While the phenomenon of crowdsourcing is not new, it has gained considerable attention in practice due to new crowdsourcing opportunities that have been enabled by new social networking and web 2.0 technologies. While crowdsourcing initiatives provide several benefits for the participants involved, it also poses several novel challenges to effectively manage the crowd. Drawing from the governance mechanisms in the open source literature, we develop an analysis framework to examine the governance mechanisms implemented in three different crowdsourcing initiatives and their impact on the outcome of the initiative

The Full Employment Mandate of the Federal Reserve: Its Origins and Importance

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the landmark Humphrey-Hawkins Act, this report underscores how the Federal Reserve's full employment mandate has made the Fed more accountable to working people. The report first traces the historical origins of the full employment mandate and highlights the pivotal but little-known role racial justice activists played in its creation. From the 1930s and through the rise of the civil rights movement, racial justice activists including Coretta Scott King, called for a coordinated federal effort to attain full employment. They envisioned an economy where every person who seeks employment can secure a job. King joined Congressional leaders Augustus Hawkins and Hubert Humphrey in eventually passing the landmark 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (Humphrey-Hawkins) which legally required the Fed to pursue maximum employment.The report then turns to Federal Reserve monetary policy in the 1990's which offers an instructive model of what a full employment economy can look like. This real-world case study from our recent history shows that when labor markets tighten, workers begin to see broad-based wage gains, and persistent economic inequalities are reduced. Finally, the report underscores the continued importance of the full employment mandate today while providing an overview of proposed policies to eliminate or significantly curtail its effectiveness. In light of these findings, this report calls on Federal Reserve policymakers to use all tools at their disposal to fully realize the Fed's full employment mandate. Members of Congress must publicly affirm the importance of full employment while committing to reject any efforts to weaken or eliminate the full employment mandate. In particular, the Senate must reject nominees to the Board of Governors who have called for the narrowing of the Fed's mandate or who support policies that would undermine the Fed's ability to pursue full employment

Examining the Impact of a Reasoning Aid to Help People Evaluate the Evidentiary Weight of Consensus

This item is only available electronically.Social media is a vortex of information and people may see distorted views of consensus, where the independence of information and sources is unclear. A tool that summarises consensus information might help people to navigate these important cues. This study examined whether a reasoning aid (in the form of a diagram) visually illustrating both the number of independent people supporting/disagreeing with a claim and the diversity of arguments would persuade people to change their original beliefs. Participants (n=605) were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to evaluate 24 claims on a mock Twitter interface. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions with either tweets only, diagram only or tweets with a diagram. Participants rated their initial agreement level (0-100) with each claim and then saw the diagram and/or set of tweets, then were able to update their agreement level if their original opinion had now changed. The findings of this study show that without assistance, people mostly rely on cues of argument quantity, such as the number of tweets for a given stance. However, when presented with a diagram, people were able to utilise cues of argument quality, such as when there were different sources providing the information and when multiple arguments were used.Thesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 202

ICANN, Inc.: Accountability and participation in the governance of critical Internet resources

This paper assesses the relationship between public participation and accountability in ICANN. It explains how ICANN has responded to accountability concerns by creating new opportunities for public comment, review, and participation. Is public participation an adequate means of making this global Internet governance organization accountable to the public? ICANN is fundamentally a private corporation. Private corporations are held accountable in three ways: 1) directly through their membership or shareholders, 2) through competition, which gives the public the opportunity to avoid their products or services, and 3) through external regulation or supervision by judicial or public authorities. None of these forms of accountability apply to ICANN. Instead, the public is given a wide range of opportunities to participate in ICANN's processes and to voice their opinions. This paper questions whether participation is an adequate substitute for accountability. It analyzes three distinct reforms in ICANN's history to show how participation can displace accountability rather than improve it

Why Contests Improve Philanthropy: Six Lessons on Designing Public Prizes for Impact

Since 2007, Knight foundation has run or funded nearly a dozen open contests, many over multiple years, choosing some 400 winners from almost 25,000 entries, and granting more than $75 million to individuals, businesses, schools and nonprofits. The winners believe, as we do, that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. The contests reflect the full diversity of our program areas: journalism and media innovation, engaging communities and fostering the arts. Over the past seven years, we have learned a lot about how good contests work, what they can do, and what the challenges are. Though contests represent less than 20 percent of our grant-making, they have improved our traditional programs in myriad ways. A 2009 McKinsey & Company Report, "and the winner is....," put it this way: "Every leading philanthropist should consider the opportunity to use prizes to help achieve their mission, and to accept the challenge of fully exploiting this powerful tool." But of America's more than 76,000 grant-making foundations, only a handful, maybe 100 at most, have embraced the use of contests. That means 99.9 percent do not. Sharing these lessons here is an invitation to others to consider how contests, when appropriate, might widen their networks, deepen the work they already do, and broaden their definition of philanthropic giving. Before you launch and manage your own contests, you might want to consider the six major lessons we've learned about how contests improved our philanthropy