UPDATED: Crowdsourcing to replace social networks?

Mark Pesce writes in “This That and the Other Thing” the following:

“The easy answer is the obvious one: crowdsourcing (see also description later in post). The action of a few million hyperconnected individuals resulted in a massive and massively influential work: Wikipedia. But the examples only begin there. They range much further afield.

“Uni [University] students have been sharing their unvarnished assessments of their instructors and lecturers. Ratemyprofessors.com has become the bête noire of the academy, because researchers who can’t teach find they have no one signing up for their courses, while the best lecturers, with the highest ratings, suddenly find themselves swarmed with offers for better teaching positions at more prestigious universities. A simply and easily implemented system of crowdsourced reviews has carefully undone all of the work of the tenure boards of the academy.

“It won’t be long until everything else follows. Restaurant reviews – that’s done. What about reviews of doctors? Lawyers? Indian chiefs? Politicans? ISPs? (Oh, wait, we have that with Whirlpool.) Anything you can think of. Anything you might need. All of it will have been so extensively reviewed by such a large mob that you will know nearly everything that can be known before you sign on that dotted line.

“All of this means that every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.”

He suggests that these e-connections and contributions can in effect tell us which restaurant can be trusted to eat at, which professor we can entrust to teach us a class.  In principle, one could use this to also pass on social reputation with pictures and names for community residents who had behaved in an untrustworthy manner so others could avoid them.  On its face it sounds like a persuasive argument and part of a strand that suggests that the new technology can always out-do what we used to do.  Assuming the software is effective at eliminating shills (as eBay or Amazon had to contend with — writers or sellers getting fake users or affiliated users from giving them great reviews), these kind of crowdsourcing techniques can be helpful.  Yelp’s recommendations about restaurants are often good; and Amazon’s recommendations are instructive.

What can’t these invisible, helping e-networks do?  1) get at the truth with contested theories of what happened; 2) tell you whether you should value A’s comments more than B’s (although in principle the software could rate the comments by friends in common or their reputation); 3) actually be useful for things beyond spreading information (trust, reciprocity, social support, etc.).

Pesce goes on to point out that the technology does have limits.  Technology brings us together in anarcho-syndicalism and offers the potential for community.  But what limits its effectiveness is that we have a collision between the e-crowd and community and community requires us to work together.  We want to copy and mimic what others have done, but that requires each of us to act for the good of others.

“But [our] laziness, it’s built into our culture. Socially, we have two states of being: community and crowd. A community can collaborate to bring a new mobile carrier into being. A crowd can only gripe about their carrier. And now, as the strict lines between community and crowd get increasingly confused because of the upswing in hyperconnectivity, we behave like crowds when we really ought to be organizing like a community.

And this…is..the message I really want to leave you with. You … are the masters of the world. Not your bosses, not your shareholders, not your users. You. You folks, right here and right now. The keys to the kingdom of hyperconnectivity have been given to you. You can contour, shape and control that chaotic meeting point between community and crowd. That is what you do every time you craft an interface, or write a script. Your work helps people self-organize. Your work can engage us at our laziest, and turn us into happy worker bees. It can be done. Wikipedia has shown the way.

And now, as everything hierarchical and well-ordered dissolves into the grey goo which is the other thing, you have to ask yourself, “Who does this serve?”…I want you to remember that each of you holds the keys to the kingdom. Our community is yours to shape as you will. Everything that you do is translated into how we operate as a culture, as a society, as a civilization. It can be a coming together, or it can be a breaking apart. And it’s up to you.”

What Pesce doesn’t discuss is “social capital.”  This seems to be missing from his remarks.  Some of us may serve others in real space or electronically through the goodnesss of our hearts.  We’re do-gooders or e-do.gooders.  But others of us need to understand that these social ties hold us accountable to the group.  They make us more likely to do things for others because we are hardwired to provide more for people inside our circles than outside our circles.  That’s why we give more to our family than to strangers and help friends more than we do a tribe half-way around the world.  Social ties redefine our sense of ‘we’.

It’s hard to believe that exhortations to do good on the Internet, as important as they are, will achieve the optimal amount of communal action.  That is, after all, why commons are overgrazed and oceans are overfished.  Because too many in society realize that there is more to be had from overgrazing and overfishing now rather than letting someone else do it.

Social capital can also help police social norms (of working for others, of contributing, of not taking more than one’s share).  Experimental evidence shows that fairness also seems hardwired into our brains.  We are willing to punish others in experimental Ultimatum or Dictator Games from behaving in a selfish manner, even when it means that we the punisher gets less.

For more on Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe (from Wired) has an interesting new book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (2008).

Definition: A company outsourcing a job traditionally served by employees and fills it through an open call to large undefined group of people, generally using on the internet.  People best qualified to do the job are not always the person that one would first think of to assign a job in a corporation.

CrowdSourcing builds upon The Wisdom of Crowds; in it, Howe identifies 4 ways in which groups can produce better results than individuals: collective intelligence, crowd creation, crowd voting, and crowd funding.

From BusinessWeek’s review of the book: “In the first [category], collective intelligence, companies including Dell and gold-mining group Goldcorp ask people inside and outside the company to help solve problems and suggest new products, such as Dell’s Linux-based computers. The second model, crowd creation, is used by businesses such as Current TV and Frito-Lay to create news segments and video ads. People vote for their favorite T-shirt design at apparel maker Threadless’ Web site, thereby illustrating crowd voting. Startups SellaBand and Kiva use the last model, crowdfunding, to underwrite new music labels and fund microloans to individuals.

“Howe’s best example is iStockphoto, a startup that is undermining the established stock-photo business. The community began in 2000 as a vehicle for hobbyists who wanted to trade their pics. Two years later, iStock began selling photos for 25 cents each to cover bandwidth costs. Clients flocked in, and in 2006, Getty Images bought the enterprise. Now, with 60,000 part-time photographers and illustrators on board, 3.5 million images in the bank, and 2 million customers, iStock is the world’s third-largest dealer of images.

“Howe sweeps away certain misapprehensions about such activity. While it’s true that most people who are involved don’t get paid, they still need incentives. At iStockphoto, that comes in the form of workshops in which people meet and share expertise. And Howe warns that not all crowds are created equal. For example, he suggests that sports teams would do better to use fantasy-league enthusiasts rather than scientists to handicap up-and-coming athletes. Perhaps the hardest lesson for businesses is the importance of including people with whom you don’t ordinarily work. Organizations reinforce similar approaches and inside-the-box thinking. When you’re looking for something truly different, the crowd can lead you down a less traveled path.”

While Howe praises this rise of the ‘virtual crowd’ — you used to have to actually assemble a crowd to benefit and now gee-whiz you can do it on the internet — I wonder whether despite benefits to corporations or individuals (like cheaper pictures on iStockPhoto or better predictions of what ads will work), we’ve lost the social capital inherent in actual crowds or the social capital built from these old-line processes.

If we are migrating to more CrowdSourcing we ought at least pursue what we do (at a minimum via the Internet) to actually bring this virtual crowd together (making creating e-events, maybe creating communities of interest as was the genesis of iStockPhoto, maybe if the virtual crowd is large enough, breaking it down by zip code and encouraging and facilitating pieces of the crowd getting together in real space).  What’s good for the goose is not always so for the gander, and CrowdSourcing is likely to lead to cheaper outcomes (for example photos) and often better, more democratic decisions, it portends to exacerbate the real losses we’ve seen in our true communities over the last generation.

10/7/09 update: Facebook, through Facebook Connect, now uses crowd-sourcing for foreign language translation, getting users to vote on which user-supplied translations are best for various phrases.  More here:

Wikipedia: to delete or not to delete?

The Economist has an interesting story about the debate raging within Wikipedia about whether Wikipedia should let a 1000 flowers bloom (or in Wikipedia’s case, over 2,000,000 entries) or should limit the number of articles to ones it deems of broader interest. For example, should there be 500 articles on individual Pokemon characters or not?

It’s analogous to the debate about whether community is built top-down or bottom-up. The bottom-up folks “the inclusionists” believe that letting contributors determine what is newsworthy (or article-worthy) builds a stronger sense of community and participation. Top-downers (or “deletionists”) believe that, although the storage space for these relatively obscure or not well edited articles is minimal, that having too sprawling content leads to lower citizen participation in editing and improving these entries. An appropriate analogy might be that it would be easier to get volunteers to work on a small but usable urban park than blanket Denali National Park (a park the size of Massachusetts, even if people lived close to Mt. Denail in Alaska). Also, potentially Wikipedia’s perceived quality is only as good as its weakest articles or average articles and as the volume of articles rises and the level of editing doesn’t rise proportionately, average quality article gets weaker.

The bar has been raised, whether appropriately or not, for new wikipedia entries and as a consequence a greater percentage of new wikipedia articles get denied. As a consequence, “[m]any who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project”

The Economist notes that it is getting harder and harder to draw the appropriate line around inclusion. “How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?

“To measure a subject’s worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper; ten matches on Google is better than one match; and so on. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not) or diplomats (permanent chiefs of station are notable, while chargés d’affaires ad interim are not).

“Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has himself fallen foul of these tricky notability criteria. Last summer he created a short entry about a restaurant in South Africa where he had dined. The entry was promptly nominated for deletion, since the restaurant had a poor Google profile and was therefore considered not notable enough. After a lot of controversy and media coverage (which, ahem, increased the restaurant’s notability), the entry was kept, but the episode prompted many questions about the adequacy of the editorial process.”

Other related Wikipedia items: Kevin Kelly notes that his answer to the Edge’s question in 2008 –”What have you changed your mind about?” — is the success of Wikipedia which he thought would never work. And there’s a fascinating insider account by Nicholson Baker (masquerading as a book review in New York Review of Books of “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual”) discussing the amazingly unscientific process of deciding what articles makes it in or not to Wikipedia.

See the Economist article here.

Civic participation in monitoring climate change: watching flowers bud

In another interesting example of how individuals can collectively produce a useful social good (much like ideas of monitoring bird flows, wikipedia, appearances or constructing an urban rain catchment area with cisterns on people’s houses), and developing patient data on rare diseases (PatientsLikeMe), Project BudBurst is aiming to chart climate change by the dates on which various leaves and flowers bud in your area.

They are targeting native U.S. tree and flower species and then putting the results into the BudBurst database. Since budding is a phenological event it is sensitive to climate change and can help track the dispersed impact of such. Through this effort “scientists can use it to learn about the responses of individual plant species to climatic variation locally, regionally, and nationally, and to detect longer-term impacts of climate change by comparing with historical data.”

(Project BudBurst is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and a team of partners.)

Are social networks replacing search engines?

A comment here on Search Engine Journal suggests that social bookmarks like reddit, delicious, StumbleUpon, may replace Google as the search engines of the future.

The author hints to the advantage of these social bookmarks as incorporating human intelligence, but the author ignores the fact that Google is already powered by links incorporating human intelligence as well. The fact that Google ranks sites by (among other things) the number of external websites linking to those website URLs is already a social form of bookmarking or search. The sites that other people find powerful, influential or authentic get linked to and hence are listed higher in the Google rankings.

In Ian Ayres very interesting read, SuperCrunchers, he discusses Google’s beta search efforts as a way of using personalized information about searchers.

“Tera mining of customer records, airline prices, and inventories is peanuts compared to Google’s goal of organizing all the world’s information. … Google has developed a Personalized Search feature that uses your past search history to further refine what you really have in mind. If Bill Gates and Martha Stewart both Google ‘blackberry,’ Gates is more likely to see web pages about the email device at the top of his results list, while Stewart is more likely to see web pages about the fruit. Google is pushing this personalized data mining into almost every one of its features. Its new web accelerator dramatically speeds up access to the Internet–not by some breakthrough in hardware or software technology–but by predicting what you are going to want to read next. Google’s web accelerator is continually pre-picking web pages from the net. So while you’re reading the first page of an article, it’s already downloading pages two and three. And even before you fire up your browser tomorrow morning, simple data mining helps Google predict what sites you’re going to want to look at (hint: it’s probably the same sites you look at most days). “

I’ve long been interested in how websites can use network knowledge (the wisdom captured within its usebase). Slashdot.org found a way to do this in distributing the ability to praise or ding posts of members (without giving anyone veto power); Wikipedia does this through distributing editorial input; Craigslist does this by giving users the power to flag postings as spam.  And I’ve separately written about “viral popularity” as a way of using social networks to spread the popularity of interest in media of various sorts.

Power of God, why permanence makes us happier, and wikiscanning

There were several interesting stories in the NYT Sunday Magazine section “Year in Ideas” section.

We’ve previously reported on wikiscanning.

But the “God Effect” highlights something that we have observed in our work, the strong connection between religiosity and altruism and philanthropy, even if it is altruism or philanthropy for secular purposes. The “God Effect” suggests that those who are more religious are constantly in the background of their mind thinking “What would God do?”, “What would Allah do?”, etc. and this leads them to make more charitable decisions, or in the case of the “dictator game” experiment of Ara Norenzayan, fairer distributions with an opponent. [Interestingly, Norzenzayan, in a second experiment primed participants to think of police, contract and civil, and found that this also led to people proposing fairer distributions, although in this case for the religious and secular alike.]

In “Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness“, the magazine summarizes research of Peter Ubel, of University of Michigan on colostomy patients (who had portions of their colons removed or bypassed). This condition is so unpleasant that many say that they would prefer to die. Six months later, the temporary patients who were likely to heal and have their bowels reconnected” showed worse quality of life and lower happiness than ones that expected their colostomy to be permanent.

This mirrors work done by Dan Gilbert (and reported here at 15:15). Harvard students in a photography course took photos of their favorite things of Harvard; they blew up their 2 favorite photographs into beautiful prints and were then told at the nth hour that they had to give one up permanently. A control group was told that they had 4 days to switch their choice if they changed their mind and staff would come to their dormroom for convenience to swap. Those who were stuck with their photograph liked it a lot more during these 4 days and afterwards. A “reversible condition is not conducive to happiness”, Gilbert says. But Gilbert notes that 2/3 of Harvard students choose to be in a course where they have a chance at the end to choose their photograph rather than have to pick one irreversibly, even though this ability to choose leads to lower happiness.

Your tax dollars at work spinning wikipedia entries

I previously referred to wikiscanner here – the neat tool developed by Virgil Griffith that lets you detect whether governmental or corporate entities have been trying to change wikipedia entries.

Reuters now reports that CIA and FBI computers were used to try to entry wikipedia entries on Guantanamo and the Iraq War.

“Griffith said he developed WikiScanner ‘to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike (and) to see what ‘interesting organizations’ (which I am neutral towards) are up to.’ ” Looks like mission accomplished for Griffith.

Wikipedia has said that the entries may violate their conflict of interest policy that prhobits people with close ties to an issue to submit or edit an entry about it.

It will do wonders for trust of government to see that the government, having failed to convince the public that the Iraq War was a wise policy intervention, is now actively spinning wikipedia entries to try to re-define how the war and Guantanamo is captured by the ‘public.’

I liked the comments of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) that Wikipedia ought to add a feature when someone clicks on edit to say: “Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from XXX company. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’ ” he said. “That might make them stop and think.” (NYT story 8/19/07) Might be nice to combine Griffith’s wikiscanner applet with the color-coding of Wikipedia entries so that a different color would alert the reader of all corporately entered entries that might be government or corporate spin jobs, rather than having to go to Wikiscanner and find this out himself or herself. That way the user could hover over text that says *the Valdez oil spill was a tremendous boon for the environment* and see with a pop-up window that this was entered by Exxon.

Epilogue: the New York Times in Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits (8/19/07) reported on this same phenomenon and noted that other corporations have been snared in Virgil Griffith’s software: Anheuser-Busch; Pepsico; and the perennial corporate villains from central casting Wal-Mart, Diebold, and Exxon.

Gauging Wikipedia reliability: wikiscanner

I posted earlier about new beta software that enables one to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia posts through color-coding.   New software by Virgil Griffith called wikiscanner, enables one to unmask anonymous editings to wikipedia entries made by governmental, private companies, political organizations, etc.  [Thanks to Digg for the heads-up on this; article featured on this in Wired magazine.]

Community-created encyclopedias are nice, but it’s also nice to know who the “community” is that is creating/modifying these entries.  It helps to restore trust around these wikipedia entries if you know that the community that is editing these entries are hired guns and can discount certain edits.

Shading to indicate reliability of Wikipedia entries

One of the bugbears of community-supplied information is gauging its credibility.  Unlike a traditional outlet (say a newspaper) that verifies all the information before they print or airs it, information can be submitted from community members that is not very accurate.

A researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz in their WikiLab has come up with a system for trying to give readers of such community sites a better indication of the veracity of the information. They use an algorithm that evaluates how long other entries from this individual survived in Wikipedia without being re-edited and how well vetted these entries were by trusted readers.  From this it generates a reliability measure for this author. Then it assigns that reliability or lack of reliability to the entries he/she made on other pages.

Entries judged to be more questionable are printed on orange highlighted background; more reliable entries are printed in white background.  The darker the hue, the more dubious the content.

Computer scientist Luca de Alfaro has so far just compiled several hundred Wikipedia pages into a demo.

Another interesting feature is that unknown authors can gain or lose reliability relatively quickly after well known Wikipedia users review their pages and either find the entries fine (increasing the author’s trust score) or problematic (lowering the author’s score).

“The idea is very simple,” de Alfaro said. “If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If your contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls.” De Alfaro will speak about his new program August 4, 2007  at the Wikimania conference in Taipei, Taiwan.

They have tested the reliability scores against how long contemporary edits remain on Wikipedia. In sample runs, over 80% of flagged edits turn out to be wrong and were changed. [Other Wikipedia users corrected 60-70% of these edits relatively quickly, but presumably the value of the program is helping readers with the 30-40% of edits that are not quickly corrected and would otherwise dupe would-be readers.]

It takes roughly a week for de Alfaro to evaluate Wikipedia’s seven-year edit history with his algorithm.  While he is working off of a distributed copy of the Wikipedia site, he says real time adjustments could be made relatively easily.

They do not publish author rating scores, because they fear it would spark competitiveness (which is the opposite of the site’s culture) and to discourage infrequent but knowledgeable authors whose low score is a function of their low number of entries.

It may be easier to assign reliability scores on Wikipedia given the community editing function, but one could imagine using other similar reliability measures (that just looked at how reliable other users found this user’s posts or how many were discovered to be fraudulent or incorrect) to shade some of the community maps described in an earlier post, like the location of potholes or trail obstructions or the extent of flooding in England.  [The darkest of the shade could show the reliability of the item.]

Trust has been a key feature of other community sites like slashdot (that uses community ratings of moderators and metamoderators to gauge the value of a post and decide what gets aired) or e-bay which has ratings scores on transactions, etc.

Press release available here.

Community mapping

An interesting NYT story (“With Simple New Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking“, NYT, 7/27/07) describes how individuals are collectively using available mapping software to help create community maps. 

 The article describes how a Federal Way, WA resident created an online map that individuals could contribute to to chart the growth of graffiti in his town. 

But such approaches have been used in many other instances not described in the NYT story.

 For example, this community mapping is being used to track the extent of flooding in British areas. 

A UK site has a map where people can map potholes that they find so that the localities can fix them or see a map of the hazards here.  [A related UK website lets individuals report downed trees, etc. that block trails and see the map of hazards here.]  Or this site in Bakerfield, CA shows the location of citizen-reported potholes with notes when they are fixed [note: Rochester, MN or Sioux City or Houston have somewhat similar sites].  Bakefield users can add photos of the potholes to the map locations, but only a few do.

This site (by a Dartmouth student) shows the extent of recovery in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans for Katrina victims; one can zoom in to see a block or the condition of specific houses.

These mash-ups (as some call these mixtures of maps and reporting) can be used by citizens to describe areas where properties sell for less than the government thinks they are worth or pintpoint the location of bombings in Iraq (as described in this presentation by Dan Gilmour.)

One could imagine the same mapping software being used by community residents to report where they spotted prostitutes or drug dealers (to help law enforcement authorities), etc.

 Wikimapia offers software that lets residents describe places in their community, but so far those efforts have been far more granular and less dense in contributions at the level of a block or community.  This site describes 8 other interesting community mapping programs, including Platial.  Another effort, Urban Tapestries, is something of a cross between GIS systems, knowledge mapping and sharing.

 This blog site (Google Maps Mania) describes many other such efforts, like efforts to map crime statistics in cities, free summer meals for school-age children in NYC, etc.

This software offers the potential to create useful tools to spur local participation in caring for their neighborhood, and in creating tools that foster citizens or government being able to respond more effectively.

For more on this phenomenon, read  Advocacy mashups harness power of mapping: Google Earth Outreach is a new service aimed at non-profits and activists.

It’s not clear that the software will lead to greater social capital, but it might lead to increased civic engagement and a stronger sense of shared collective norms.

 The challenge with many such community mapping approaches, as Dan Gilmour notes, is ensuring that they are accurate and can be trusted.

See also this follow-up post on a related topic on gauging trustworthiness of such community information.

Let us know through comments about other interesting examples of community mapping on the web or your thoughts on the social promise of this technology.

Mapping together

In an interesting example of Web 2.0 and wiki approach to mapping, the NYT reports that Tom Tom (maker of GPS maps) is enabling users to correct mistakes to outdated GPS maps through MapShare and revise maps directly from their car GPS screens. 

It’s a neat example of people helping others informally and collectively with no immediate payback, other than the collectively improved GPS maps. Unfortunately, in this effort, users won’t know of the good deeds done by others, so it is not easy to capitalize on such ‘kindness of strangers’ to change people’s conception of social trust.  [The Blanche DuBoises of the world will get a better map, but won't know of the hundreds or thousands of kind acts that yielded this.]