Syndicom

Crowdsourcing, collaboration and collective wisdom.

Last week, we wrote about the issues of posting, participation and presence in online communities such as SpineConnect. Recently I was commenting on a blog post about crowdsourcing and participatory medicine and raised the question — what is the difference between crowdsourcing and collaboration? I did so, because over the last few months, I had seen a blurring of the two terms. The blog author responded that they thought crowdsourcing was to ask a question of the crowd and then aggregate their responses whereas collaboration involved gathering together that crowd to move in a purposeful, cooperative manner towards achieving a goal. The more I read in health 2.0 about patients doing their own clinical trials etc, the more this has become salient so I thought I would do some research into what exactly these terms mean.

According to that font of all knowledge, wikipedia, here is what I found….Crowdsourcing involves basically taking a task normally performed by an individual and sending it out for open bid to an undefined large group of people. Sometimes this process is called community based design and the term is frequently used in discussions of web 2.0 technologies due to their architecture of participation; but this use of the term is not without controversy. Collaboration, on the other hand, is, as I discussed earlier, a recursive process where two or more people or groups work towards an intersection of goals by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. There is no one-to-many relation here as in crowdsourcing but more a many-to-many relationship.
While different, both these terms seem to be targetting another, much larger, phenomenon == that of “collective wisdom”. Collective wisdom as discussed in The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, is “shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups, used to solve problems and conflicts of all humanity.” Collective wisdom can be characterized by collective learning over time. Interestingly, “Crowd wisdom” or what we also know as “group think”, is used to describe the dark side of collective wisdom, or the negative implications of the herd mentality. James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, in addressing this issue discusses the key criteria that separate wise crowds from foolish ones….

1. diversity of opinion;

2. independent opinions, uninfluenced by those around them;

3. decentralization where people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge; and

4. aggregation, where there is some mechanism that exists for turning all those independent, diverse opinions into a collective, wise, decision.

Moreover, when asked how people could remain independent thinkers when faced with a deluge of information from others, Surowiecki has some interesting advice –1) keep your ties loose; 2) keep yourself exposed to as many diverse sources of information as possible; and c) make groups that range across hierarchies.

When I reflect on the people and groups operating in SpineConnect, I see people contributing their unique perspectives to a common goal. I think it would be easy to engage the community as a crowd to source, but that would reduce its power to innovate and educate. As Gary Ghiselli pointed out in his podcast on the Young Surgeons group, SpineConnect provides a place where everyone can learn something, regardless of their levels of experience, “no one, no matter where you trained, has seen everything.” There’s something beautiful in that quote and its the constant quest for collective wisdom that pushes us to move beyond sourcing the crowd and towards working well with others.