The Use of Mobile Devices as Group Wisdom Support Systems to Support Dynamic Crowdsourcing Efforts

Early group decision support systems (GDSS) literature discussed how group size and member proximity impacted the design of the room and technology necessary to facilitate group decision-making. A Legislative Session is the early term for a large group that holds face to face meetings. With advances in mobile technology, we can turn any large group meeting into an opportunity to capture the wisdom of the crowd. This paper will describe how both crowdsourcing initiatives and group wisdom support systems (GWSS) initiatives can be supported by mobile devices. An example of a keynote address at an academic conference and the use of JoinSpeaker technology will be presented as a way to hold a dynamic crowdsourcing effort

Crisis Analytics: Big Data Driven Crisis Response

Disasters have long been a scourge for humanity. With the advances in technology (in terms of computing, communications, and the ability to process and analyze big data), our ability to respond to disasters is at an inflection point. There is great optimism that big data tools can be leveraged to process the large amounts of crisis-related data (in the form of user generated data in addition to the traditional humanitarian data) to provide an insight into the fast-changing situation and help drive an effective disaster response. This article introduces the history and the future of big crisis data analytics, along with a discussion on its promise, challenges, and pitfalls

The Effective Use Of Crowdsourcing In E-Governance

The rise of Web 2.0 paradigm has empowered the Internet users to share information and generate content on social networking and media sharing platforms such as wikis and blogs. The trend of harnessing the wisdom of public using Web 2.0 distributed networks through open calls is termed as ‘Crowdsourcing’. In addition to businesses, this powerful idea of using collective intelligence or the ‘wisdom of crowd’ applies to different situations, such as in governments and non-profit organizations which have started utilizing crowdsourcing as an essential problem-solving tool. In addition, the widespread and easy access to technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones and other communication devices has resulted in an exponential growth in the use of crowdsourcing for government policy advocacy, e-democracy and e-governance during the past decade. However, utilizing collective intelligence and efforts of public to find solutions to real life problems using web 2.0 tools does come with its share of associated challenges and limitations. This paper aims at identifying and examining the value-adding strategies which contribute to the success of crowdsourcing in e-governance. The qualitative case study analysis and emphatic design methodology are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the identified strategic and functional components, by analyzing the characteristics of some of the notable cases of crowdsourcing in e-governance and the findings are tabulated and discussed. The paper concludes with the limitations and the implications for future research

Human Computation and Convergence

Humans are the most effective integrators and producers of information, directly and through the use of information-processing inventions. As these inventions become increasingly sophisticated, the substantive role of humans in processing information will tend toward capabilities that derive from our most complex cognitive processes, e.g., abstraction, creativity, and applied world knowledge. Through the advancement of human computation - methods that leverage the respective strengths of humans and machines in distributed information-processing systems - formerly discrete processes will combine synergistically into increasingly integrated and complex information processing systems. These new, collective systems will exhibit an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy in modeling physical and techno-social processes, and may ultimately coalesce into a single unified predictive organism, with the capacity to address societies most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis.Comment: Pre-publication draft of chapter. 24 pages, 3 figures; added references to page 1 and 3, and corrected typ

Innovation for creating a smart future

tToday, we live in a dynamic and turbulent global community. The wave of mega-trends, including rapidchange in globalization and technological advances, is creating new market forces. For any organizationto survive and prosper in such an environment, innovation is imperative. However, innovation is nolonger just for creating value to benefit individuals, organizations, or societies. The ultimate purpose ofinnovation should be much more far reaching, helping create a smart future where people can enjoy thebest quality of life possible. Thus, innovation must search for intelligent solutions to tackle major socialills, seek more proactive approaches to predict the uncertain future, and pursue strategies to removebarriers to the smart future. This study explores the detailed requirements of a smart future, includingboth hardware types and soft social/cultural components

Where is the Wisdom We Have Lost in Technology?

Wisdom has been at the heart of practical, philosophical, and theological interest since antiquity but is now attracting interdisciplinary scientific interest from academic researchers in diverse disciplines. Practical wisdom is important from the IS perspective because we have built information tools and technologies that can harm or benefit us in various ways and it is important that we understand the implications of these technologies. The purpose of this panel is to start and stimulate conversations with the IS community on a broad array of individual, organizational and societal issues at the intersection of wisdom and technology. The hope is to take the first steps to bring together disparate notions on wisdom in an IS context and to explore new frameworks to advance research in this emerging area representing wisdom-based IS. Broadly, this panel will explore topics relating to extending knowledge management concepts for wisdom; making meaningful distinctions between knowledge, wisdom, ethics, and other related concepts in the context of information systems teaching, research, and practice; the design, management, use, and implications of technologies for consciously discovering, creating, sharing, and supporting wisdom in individuals, organizations, and societies; interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary understanding of the nature of wisdom in a technology-driven world; and mindful living with and connected by technologies for personal, professional, and societal well-being

A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF A CROWD WISDOM ONLINE LEARNING COMMUNITY PLATFORM ON STUDENT LEARNING

The use of collective intelligence applications in educational settings has been reported in the literature for almost two decades. These collective intelligence applications aggregate individual knowledge via different synchronous and asynchronous mode of communications and Web 2.0 applications which support learning, communication and collaboration activities, and create “Wisdom of the Crowds”. Crowdsourcing further extends these collective intelligence processes in a distributed and crossorganizational way. This paper evaluates the effects and impacts of crowd wisdom applications on a peer assisted learning support service titled Peer-Assisted Learning scheme using Supplemental Instruction (PALSI) in a higher education institution in Hong Kong. Adopting the Design Science approach, an Online Learning Community (OLC) platform was developed tap on the Wisdom of Crowds and its effectiveness on student learning was evaluated. The OLC platform is not designed to replace existing face-to-face PALSI learning sessions and activities. Rather it helps to provide an additional online platform for supplementing and facilitating interaction between student mentors and mentees and among student mentees as well. The OLC platform is designed in a way that supports indexed and search functions who join the PALSI scheme, and it can also be archived as a repository for future reference by similar courses. Empirical analysis was carried out to evaluate the relationship between user participation and assessment results. Statistics show that students who made use of the OLC platform obtained better grades

Crowdsourcing for smart engagement apps in an urban context : an explorative study

This paper elaborates on the first results of an ongoing living lab project on ‘smart’ city engagement and offers a theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution to the field of user-driven innovation by describing a crowdsourcing experiment conducted in collaboration with the city of Ghent (Flanders). Our presented living lab approach has a double goal. First, it wants to empower citizens by systematically transforming the relationship(s) between citizens and between citizens (as service users) and local city-related governmental institutes (as service providers) by offering smart city applications. Second, it has the ambition to go beyond reactively studying information systems as change agents and wants to pro-actively improve engineering systems that can contribute to the desired changes in city engagement. Supporting citizens as self-actuating sensors to open up more innovative ways of collecting data is an important boundary of the research within a living lab context. We aim for user-driven innovation by involving citizens in the co-production of new electronic public services. Therefore we choose to go through a co-design process (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) with citizens defining the smart engagement applications that most probably will be developed and implemented in a living lab setting. Today, various innovation companies and organizations envision a central role for the user when looking for innovations. The attention for participation of the user is growing since the 80’s, although that the meaning of the concept ‘participation’ is not stable. Different people have used ‘participation’ in a wide variety of different situations and the widespread use of the term has tended to mean that ‘participation’ is used to refer to a wide variety of different situations by different people (Pateman, 1972). Therefore some point to participation as an empty signifier (Carpentier, 2007). The history and origin (and radicalism) of the concept as related to power issues is fading away under the diversity of its different meanings. Recently different participative methods were developed and are used to learn about users and their needs. Some known user-centered methods within industry are working with living labs (Niitamo, Kulkki, Eriksson, & Hribernik, 2006) and crowdsourcing (Hudson-Smith, Batty, Crooks, & Milton, 2009). Although participative methods were initially mainly focused on handing over the power to the user, currently much more attention is given to usability of applications and market forecasting when in the context of user involvement or co-creation. The analysis of power relations is fading slowly away. In our research the notion of participation is used in two ways: as a political phrase, referring to users who are gaining more power and impact on societal changes, and as a practical phrase referring to the forecasting of the success of urban smart engagement apps. This paper is structured in four parts. The first part of the paper introduces the concepts of engagement and ‘smartness’. The second part of the paper introduces crowdsourcing and also elaborates on the related concepts of ‘Web 2.0”, ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘wisdom of crowds’. The third part of the paper describes our methodology, introduces the online crowdsourcing enabler ‘mijndigitaalideevoorgent’, and presents the first, preliminary results of our crowdscourcing experiment. The fourth and last part of the paper formulates a conclusion and discussion of the results

Crowdsourcing as a tool for urban emergency management: lessons from the literature and typology

Recently, citizen involvement has been increasingly used in urban disaster prevention and management, taking advantage of new ubiquitous and collaborative technologies. This scenario has created a unique opportunity to leverage the work of crowds of volunteers. As a result, crowdsourcing approaches for disaster prevention and management have been proposed and evaluated. However, the articulation of citizens, tasks, and outcomes as a continuous flow of knowledge generation reveals a complex ecosystem that requires coordination efforts to manage interdependencies in crowd work. To tackle this challenging problem, this paper extends to the context of urban emergency management the results of a previous study that investigates how crowd work is managed in crowdsourcing platforms applied to urban planning. The goal is to understand how crowdsourcing techniques and quality control dimensions used in urban planning could be used to support urban emergency management, especially in the context of mining-related dam outages. Through a systematic literature review, our study makes a comparison between crowdsourcing tools designed for urban planning and urban emergency management and proposes a five-dimension typology of quality in crowdsourcing, which can be leveraged for optimizing urban planning and emergency management processes