People are often dumb, so how can crowds be wise? James Surowiecki laid the groundwork in his book, "The Wisdom of Crowds." In this solo presentation, Derek Powazek talks about creating the perfect environment for crowdsourcing wisdom.
For the first part of this session Derek went through the well told story of Francis Galton’s cow guessing contest from James Surowiecki’s book and laid out the 4 elelments of a ‘wise crowd’
The 4 elements of 'wise crowds':
2. Independence. People's opinions are not determined by those around them.
3. Decentralization. Power removed from one central location. Important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge.
4. Aggregation. A way of pulling together all the views of the group into one shared vision.
Looking at these 4 elements of wise crowds Derek Powazek thought about them in the context of the web and came up with the following rules designing for Wisdom of Crowds.
2. Large diverse groups: Groupthing is what happens when participants put the priority of the group first. Design your groups so that they encourage a diverse selection to join. A great example of this was the Chevy Tahoe campaign. No one spoke out or said inviting the audience to create ads for a petrol guzzling 4x4 was a bad idea through fear or repercussion. The results weren’t pretty. Members of a large diverse would have because they had no vested interest in keeping everyone in the group happy.
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3. Design for selfishness: People don’t participate unless they are getting something for it. Design for people’s selfish motivation or you will only get bad or no participation. A good example of this is the banner on Threadless which says “Submit an idea for Fame, Friends and $2500”.
4. Result aggregation: Aggregate the data without turning it into a game? Once you display in a list that is voted for it becomes a game. When it turns into a game or contest it gets messy because people look for ways of hyping. Digg is playable. Favrd is a good example of how to aggregate in a non-playable way. It simply monitors ‘Favourites’ from Twitter.
The session got really interesting towards the end when he talked about 2 really fascinating experiments that demonstrated how important design was in creating a Wisdom of Crowds environment on the web. The first was based around colour. There was an advert for a camera place on blue and red backgrounds. When asked about the blue background ad people talked about the image in a more creative way whilst the people who saw the red advert talked in more detail. The reason being that blue is a soothing colour which creates a relaxing environment for users. We associate red with danger, as a result people become more alert noticing more detail for fear of messing up.
Our brains are good at taking diverse feedback – this is how we understand the world. If you takeaway some of the input our brains work twice as hard to fill in the gaps.
In the second experiment there were two groups who were asked sets of questions. The ‘in control' group were always made to feel their answers were right. The ‘out of control’ were made to feel like everything they answered was wrong. The groups were then shown photos of nothing but a cloud.
What happened next was remarkable. The ‘in control’ group found nothing in the picture. However the ‘out of control’ group found something in the picture other than the cloud. We fill in those blanks as a by-product of our insecurities. When you feel out of control, you make up stories that don't have anything to do with what you're being shown.
When you feel out of control the sense of insecurity and fear forces you to question things more, your senses are sharpened and you look for answers resulting in you making stuff up. They then went back to the ‘out of control’ group and asked them to tell a story about something they felt passionate about. After they spoke for a while about something they felt good about, their pet dog for example, they were shown the images again yet saw nothing.
These two experiments tell us a lot about how important getting the design for Wisdom of Crowds is. Colour, information and layout play a big part in preparing your crowd for providing wise data.
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