Unconscious collaboration
We are all well aware of the amazing results that masses of people could produce by collaboration. Wikipedia is the most evident proof of how many not-specialized people can contribute to a bit of a huge project and together compete (and sometimes surpass) with field professionals (about this you can take a look at this TED talk and this book).
Google Flu screen
More than that, it fascinates me thinking what value the “unconscious collaboration” could produce. If we take the recent Google Flu we have an insight of what potential has the information produced by millions of people (in this case web researches). I believe the elaboration of this huge amount of data opens new scenarios and applications. Some time ago I came across to a proposal of using the localization data of mobile phone users to derive information about traffic (anyone aware of a follow-up?). One problem about these applications is the privacy, but this should be dismissed by the fact that millions of data point are merged together with no chance of backtracking.
In my view we will see more and more application of this concept, far from the traditional marketing applications, with completely new objectives (as tracking flu’s pandemic in Google Flu, got any new idea?). Furthermore I believe that the spread of internet-connected, electronic devices will definitely boost this data production by making it even more pervasive.
Who can point me a good overview about spimes?
If you are looking for a follow up of Real-Time Rome you may have a look at http://senseable.mit.edu/ .
For what concerns spimes the most updated and comprehensive source of information is the “Spime Watch” on Wired by Bruce Sterling himself; WideTag, a Turin based company, is developing an open project geared to the realization of an “open internet of things” based on Bruce Sterling’s spimes concept: see http://www.openspimes.com .
From the about page http://www.openspime.com/about-us/ :
“WideTag’s auto-catalytic growth is based on two poles of attraction: the one in Italy, serves to create a center of excellence in design and development of our solutions; and the one in California to drive our growth, from a commercial, partnership, and financial point of view.”
I’m not sold on the “non-specialization” of Wikipedia contributors, instead I think it’s quite the contrary; many are not professional with respect to their field of contribution but they are definitely experts in it (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse ), sometimes even more expert than the professionals; to rephrase this in Yochai Benkler’s words “money isn’t always the best motivator, if you leave a fifty dollars check after a dinner with friends you don’t increase the probability to be invited back, and if dinner isn’t entirely obvious think of sex”.
[...] Thanks to Francesco for pointing to the video in an interesting reflection upon enabling and leveraging “unconscious” collaboration. [...]