Surowiecki, sees a crowd as a collection of individuals whose independent knowledge is aggregated. Read that again: a collection of individuals! By no means did he say that the group of people should be like minded, or democratic, or have consensus on topics. On the contrary. Read on: independent knowledge! That’s right: collective intelligence is created when people operate independently from each other. Meaning: they just give their best suggestion for the solution of a problem on their own, and then all the answers are averaged. Most of the time, the average answer is the right one.
The ‘Wisdom of the Crowds’ is thus much more about diversity than it is about sameness. So how does that relate to communities then? That depends on the sort of community. Communities of interest are communities that are focused on a shared topic. They merely are aimed at facilitating conversation about that topic. Communities of practice are communities that are aimed to exchange knowledge about a specific field. And finally communities of purpose try to achieve objectives with a specific goal.
In my opinion only the latter of these three could actually be seen as a crowd in which wisdom is achieved. But only, when it is facilitated in a proper manner. Surowiecki: “Collective wisdom does not emerge out of consensus. The goal is not to get everyone to agree – it’s to tap into people who disagree, into the diverse information everybody has. It works best when people are not paying too much attention to what everyone else is doing.” So that would mean, that you would actually have to be very careful to have intense interactions on the platform you are creating, as that will lead eventually to herding, copying and consensus.
However, a community of purpose is not what most of the online communities are about. They are much more about communities of interest and maybe communities of practice. Inherently these types of community are about sameness and consensus. They are not a crowd but a mob. Which leads to the questions such as: is the community that fills Wikipedia really that ‘wise’?
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i have a little trouble following your reasoning. first you explain very clearly how the crowd of surowiecki is something totally different, and probably not even related. and later you still want to compare the a particular type of community with wisdom of the crowd characteristics. i don’t understand you here.
the way i read wisdom of the crowds is that it has ‘predictive’ power on simple questions in complex systems, when a crowd is questioned. exactly as you describe in your post. on top of that the type of answer must allow for an average to be taken, somehow. but perhaps a community of X does not need predictive power kind of wisdom but the creative kind of wisdom.
i totally agree with your dumbness of the mob result. i don’t see how wisdom of the crowds helps to explain that. all the reasoning to explain that is in your last two paragraphs.
I’ll try to make it more clear then:
It was as much a question as it was a statement: can the crowd Surowiecki describes be seen as a community? If it does, then what should be the characteristics of such a community?
To give an answer to those questions, you should evaluate what the crowd is that Surowiecki is talking about. And you should determine what a community is. If the answer to the first part is that diversity is key, then how does that relate to communities?
I believe not every community is the same, and that there can, or should be made a distinction between different types. I’ve used a typology that consists of three: interest, practice and purpose. And in my opinion the diversity that is needed for a crowd can only be achieved in the latter.
That brings us back to the talk about the web 2.0 meme. In Tim O’Reilly’s description of what web 2.0 is, he states that ‘collective intelligence’ is key. If that collective intelligence (or wisdom) can only be created in communities of purpose, then does that mean all those web 2.0 communities are communities of purpose. I don’t think so. I think most of them are based on sameness and consensus. Which leads to my conclusion of the dumbness of the mob.
I think your remark about creative wisdom vs predictive wisdom is an interesting one…
Maybe it is even worse… the biggest threat of Wisdom of the Crowds are communities. Communities are clusters who share a certain value-system. Individuals within such a certain community will meet up to peer-pressure which might cause exactly the counter-effect of why Crowds have wisdom vs Experts who are blind-sighted by the merits of their expertise. Than again, if hyper-individualisation boosts crowdness and thereby smartness how would one deal with social cohesion… apparently that will decrease smartness but increseas ‘……’ ?
But, I’m not sure if social cohesion decreases smartness:
Social cohesion is “a mutually supportive community of free individuals pursuing common goals by democratic means”. Which would indicate that such a community would more likely be a community of purpose (a shared goal) than of interest or practice. So it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that through social cohesion smartness would decrease.
However, in the book ‘The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies‘ Scott Page makes a distinction between, what he calls, identity diversity and cognitive diversity. His basic statement is that wisdom is created based not on what we look like on the outside, but what we look like within (tools and abilities). He states: “If well managed, identity diversity can create benefits, provided it correlates with cognitive differences and provided the task is one in which diversity matters.”
i think the crowd of surowiecki and a community (a collection of connected individuals?) have no causal relationship. in that sense they can not be linked. but they can be compared, of course. i think diversity, for example, is an important characteristic for both. in crowds (meaning surowiecki’s) it can be achieve by the group size and in a community it can be achieved by dissent and disagreement. two totally different ways of achieving diversity. another interesting is the connectedness of the individuals in these groups. in a community connectedness is necessary to form a group through communication. in a crowd you will try to bypass any form of communication around the question of the interest.
now that i understand your question better i would say a crowd is per definition not a community. but a crowd can be constructed out of anything, so also a community.
when you listen to o’reilly (web2.0) and anderson (long tail) it’s not so much community thinking. they are primarily talking about collaborative filtering and/or social networking. i think that has nothing to do with communities and community dynamics. flickr is no community, it has people with picture that sometimes bump into each to say something nice. what are they doing together? we know that they all shoot pictures. but what are they doing TOGETHER?
if you want to use a crowd it might be beneficial to know what type of community you can ‘use’. or perhaps what type of community can be best used to achieve the best results when addressed as a crowd. interesting. but i find that very hard to ‘predict’. and is there a typology of crowds as well?
Your Flickr example is a good one. I agree it is not a community, on the contrary, it is crowd (hmm, interesting contradiction?) as collective intelligence is being created in Flickr. When you view it from a wider perspective: all the photo’s on Flickr are the collective intelligence (or creative intelligence). It can even inspire to create new photo’s, but inherently you are acting as an individual. By that same logic: amazon is not a community, but it is creating collective intelligence as well in all the reviews. Same goes for del.icio.us I guess…
In these examples: community would be, when people do it together(?) Meaning: working all together on one photo, writing one review together, or searching for the ultimate link. Which is working towards a consensus…
What does that make a wiki?