ON COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: The Future of IT-Mediated Crowds John Prpić Beedie School of Business Simon Fraser University pr...@sfu.ca
Software (including web pages and mobile applications etc) is the key building block of the IT field in terms of human interaction, and can be construed as an artifact that codifies organizational process “…in the form of software embedded “routines” (Straub and Del Guidice 2012). These organizational processes are frozen into the artifact, though not fossilized, since the explicit codification that executes an artifact can be readily updated when desired (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001, Yoo et al. 2012). A software artifact always includes “a setting of interaction” or a user interface, for example a GUI or a DOS prompt (Rogers 2004), where human beings employ the embedded routines codified within the artifact (including data) for various purposes, providing input, and receiving programmed output in return. The setting of interaction provides both the limits and possibilities of the interaction between a human being and the artifact, and in turn this “dual-enablement” facilitates the functionality available to the employ of a human being or an organization (Del Giudice 2008). This structural view of artifacts (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001) informs us that “IT artifacts are, by definition, not natural, neutral, universal, or given” (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001), and that “IT artifacts are always embedded in some time, place, discourse, and community” (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). Emerging research and our observation of developments in Industry and in the Governance context signals that organizations are increasingly engaging Crowds through IT artifacts to fulfill their idiosyncratic needs. This new and rapidly emerging paradigm of socio-technical systems can be found in Crowdsourcing (Brabham 2008), Prediction Markets (Arrow et al. 2008), Wikis (Majchrzak et al. 2013), Crowdfunding (Mollick 2013), Social Media (Kietzmann et al 2011), and Citizen Science techniques (Crowston & Prestopnik 2013). Acknowledging and incorporating these trends, research has emerged conceptualizing a parsimonious model detailing how and why organizations are engaging Crowds through IT in these various substantive domains (Prpić & Shukla 2013, 2014). The model considers Hayek's (1945) construct of dispersed knowledge in society, as the antecedent condition (and thus the impetus too) driving the increasing configuration of IT to engage Crowds, and further details that organizations are doing so for the purposes of capital creation (knowledge & financial). However, as might be expected, many questions remain in this growing domain, and thus I would like to present the following questions to the FIS group, to canvas your very wise and diverse views. Is there such a thing as Collective Intelligence? How does IT effect the existence or non-existence of Collective Intelligence? - http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Woolley2010a.pdf - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1919614 - http://www.collectiveintelligence2014.org/ How do national innovation systems (and thus policy too) change when we consider IT-mediated crowds as the 4th Helix of innovation systems? - http://www.springer.com/business+%26+management/book/978-1-4614-2061-3 Does the changing historical perception of crowds signal other societal changes? - http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1907199 Sources: Afuah, Allan, and Christopher L. Tucci. "Crowdsourcing as a solution to distant search." Academy of Management Review 37.3 (2012): 355-375. Anne Majchrzak, Christian Wagner, and Dave Yates. 2013. The Impact of Shaping on Knowledge Reuse for Organizational Improvement with Wikis. MIS Quarterly, 37, 2, (2013), 455–A12. Daren C. Brabham. 2008. Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: An introduction and cases. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 14, 1, (2008), 75–90. John Prpić and Prashant Shukla. 2013. The Theory of Crowd Capital. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, January 7-10, Computer Society Press, (2013). John Prpić and Prashant Shukla. 2014. The Contours of Crowd Capability. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Big Island Hawaii, January 6-9, Computer Society Press, (2014). Kenneth Arrow, Forsythe, M. Gorham, R. Hahn, R. Hanson, J.O. Ledyard, S. Levmore, R. Litan, P. Milgrom, F.D. Nelson, G.R. Neumann, M. Ottaviani, T.C. Schelling, R.J. Shiller, V.L. Smith, E. Snowberg, C.R. Sunstein, P.C. Tetlock, P.E. Tetlock, H.R. Varian, J. Wolfers, and E. Zitzewitz. 2008. The promise of prediction markets. Science. 320, 5878, (2008), 877-878. Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), 241-251. Kevin Crowston and Nathan Prestopnik. 2013. Motivation and data quality in a citizen science game: A design science evaluation. Proceedings of Hawai’i International Conference on System Science. (2013). Mollick, Ethan R. "The dynamics of crowdfunding: Determinants of success and failure." Journal of Business Venturing, (2013). Hayek, F.A, “The use of knowledge in society”, The American Economic Review, (35:4), 1945, pp. 519-530. Straub, D. W., & Del Giudice, M. M. (2012). Software as Surrogate for Human Information Processing. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), A1–A1. Yoo, Y., Boland, R. J., Lyytinen, K., & Majchrzak, A. (2012). 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