Blog One: Collective Intelligence and Collaboration

     When someone is asked what constitutes a community we automatically say a "group of people with similar goals and interests" or "a safe environment/place where we do not fear being judge" but hardly do we think about the virtual communities that surround us every day. With the advance development of the Internet, we start to realize that online communities are just as important as the physical communities we see everyday.

     With the building of an online community we see a important aspect that must be present – collaboration. With the reading of "What Is Collaboration Anyway?" we see that though the word literally means "working together" the collaborative action can have more than one intent and also more than one repercussion. The group must have goals and intentions and is very culture and context based. Online we also tend to see different levels of collaboration differentiated by "weak" "stronger" and "intense." An example of a weak collaboration would include aggregation such as hashtags and search engines. Unlike an intense collaboration which would include Wikipedia. Overall, one of the many goals is to lower friction.

     With the understanding of collaboration it is now easier to understand collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is mutual recognition resulting in mobilization of skills. According to Pierre Levy's book "Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace" collective intelligence is the process of getting smarter together. He states that this should be a every day use of individuals helping each other for the better good. This the broadest form of collaboration. Here's a video that can help better understand "collective intelligence":

     Overall, these concepts have positive outcomes in the online world but can also carry negative consequences. Like James Surowiecki mentions in his TED Talk "The Power and the Danger of Online Crowds," though crowds can be more intelligent than individuals they can also cause more damage. All for the simple fact that the more we are link together the harder it is to be independent. At the end of the day Intelligence requires independent thinking.  Here is the example Surowiecki uses that perfectly explains the danger of not independently thinking: https://youtu.be/h-Xm4ufnoxY?t=15m5s


    The last article I would like to talk about is a piece by NPR called "Social Network Nextdoor Moves to Block Racial Profiling Online." In this article an app by the name of Nextdoor is being criticized for blocking users from publishing certain posts most importantly when it involves racial profiling. The issue that arises is that there is no universal definition of racial profiling. But Nextdoor claims that with these changes there has been a 50 percent reduction in racial profiling. (Though it does not say from how much. Are we automatically suppose to assume from 100 percent? ) There is a reason why the app did make the changes and that's because of a group called Neighbors for Racial Justice with pretty much gave Nextdoor blueprints as how to make the changes. On the upside the police department is happy to see the change since it gives more details when it comes to finding a suspect. This article is an example of an online community that is seeing change in their collaborative efforts.

What's Nextdoor? Check it out: https://youtu.be/9V1tlhGjSMc