Crowdthinking

A term semantically structured like crowdsourcing, capturing the idea of thinking together in large numbers, swarming a intellectual tasks.

Crowdthinking is a process, which is based on emergent social / collective intelligence.

From Tibi

Crowdthinking is related to social or collective intelligence. I like the concept as a verb rather than a thing. I think we have more to gain if we start thinking in terms of processes, a pragmatic philosophical approach. Crowdthinking means thinking together, at large scale. Scientists think together, since they always take into consideration other scientists’ ideas, findings, theories that are publicly available in the scientific literature. All scientific projects start with a literature review, it is part of the methodology used by scientists today. Moreover, the list of references is the embodiment of that research and of how ideas of other scientists are incorporated in a new research project. Scientific development is largely asynchronous, i.e. spread over time, relying on scientific literature as a support of information, or shared memory. Increasingly, with the advent of the Internet, which connects us all in real time, we can think together at large scale, synchronously and asynchronously.

Large scale synchronous crowdthinking has become possible

But thinking together requires specialized tools, methodologies and rules, as well as a proper work culture. In today’s context, crowdthinking can extend continuously and seemingly from being synchronous to asynchronous. Actually, both regimes can be present at the same time. We experience that when we co-edit Wikipedia, a Google doc, when we collaborate on software using Github, etc. Synchronous crowdthinking requires a high level of brain-to-brain coordination. It requires a process in which multiple individuals' brains construct a shared pattern, a shared understanding, they form some level of coherence, to such a degree that all the brains think together as one. Every brain brings its own knowledge and perspective, but they all coordinate on the idea thread, they share goals, they can criss-cross each other in the process. For example, some people who decide to write a text together separate the task sections and distribute them among participants, to stitch them together at the end into one text. This is not the type thinking together that we are talking about here. Crowdthinking is about how we experience writing text collaboratively within Sensorica, where everyone writes on top of each other, at the same time. We do that using a tested methodology, which contains an initial phase of building shared understanding, forging a collective brain. This phase can take up to 60% of the time. After this phase, the duration of the rest of the phases diminish exponentially, with the actual writing of the text taking only 5% of the time. A complex text of 30 pages can be completed in one week. Usually, the text is of a higher quality, because it contains a more diverse set of ideas and perspectives.

Synchronous crowdthinking is like a game of soccer. Every player has access to the play in real time. Players in a team form a team, which means that through practice they have built a shared something, akin to the shared understanding in Sensorica’s collaborative text writing methodology. The players have developed an intuition about the game, they share tactics, they already know each player’s style, strengths and weaknesses. As the play goes on, they process it and position themselves according to their best judgement for the next move. Every player contributes to the play, they co-construct the next move together. In order for a group of individual players to become a team they need to practice together and to reach a consensus on the style of the team, the tactics used, etc. Team members share play patterns and they are trained to detect these patterns on the fly, as they emerge during the game, and to reinforce them. The same can be said about a group of musicians jamming a session of Jazz. If they practice for a while together they form a band and jam in harmony.

From the intense synchronous crowdthinking to the asynchronous crowdthinking, the passage is smooth, because the same pattern underlies both. How is crowdsourcing related to this same pattern?

Just to be clear, by crowdsourcing we don’t mean the multi-sided platform / brokerage / marketplace pattern behind crowdsourcing proprietary platforms for crowdsourcing ideas or money, where a company is matched with innovators and ideas. We are talking here about a group of individuals who decide to engage in a collaborative process as peers, by sharing their assets. Take Bitcoin for example, the exchange service is crowdsourced, not through a third party, but through a truly p2p process.

Crowdthinking cannot be reduced to crowdsourcing. There is gathering in crowdsourcing. The action is to pull together stuff from multiple sources, from the crowd. That stuff is not internal to an individual. It can be design files, documented ideas, material resources of all kinds, currency, etc. Crowdthinking is not about crowdsourcing ideas. It is not just building a list of ideas from different people, or sharing ideas in a p2p fashion. Crowdthinking is crowdcognition. It is thinking together as tightly coordinated brains, influencing each other as they go, self-organizing concepts and formal thoughts (written ideas). It’s like in the soccer game, players build the play together moment by moment. Crowdthinking is brains coming together to form a larger entity able to act as one, a common brain, rather than pulling stuff from different sources to be used in a process. The process relies on building shared understanding, sharing patterns, and constructing something internal to each individual involved in the process rather than gathering something from every individual. A technological analogy can be Ethereum, one computing machine made of many independent computing machines that share a protocol, as opposed to SETI@home, one computer dispatching tasks to thousands of computers, to crowdsource computing power.

I believe that p2p is more innovative because of these crowd-based processes. I believe that this is already empirically observed and that it can be explained theoretically.

AI-enhanced crowdthinking

To be developed, see theory and practice in Sensorica.