Combining Experts and Crowds to Address Challenging Societal Problems

From writing an encyclopedia, to developing software, to folding proteins, more and more problems that used to be solved by small groups of experts are now being solved by much larger "crowds" of people using the Internet. For many complex problems, however, the creativity, energy, and diversity that crowds bring are not enough to solve the problems. Various kinds of specialized knowledge that only experts have are also needed. This project focuses on creating the cyber-infrastructure to combine these two kinds of resources--experts and crowds--in solving complex societal problems. The project will address this question in the context of what many people believe is one of humanity?s most important sustainability challenges today: how to deal with trending environmental dynamics. Much of the proposed work includes developing and testing ideas on the team's CoLab, a software platform and online community focused on this issue, which was developed with prior NSF and other support. More specifically, the project will investigate how experts and crowds can work together to perform four key problem-solving activities: decomposing the overall problem into smaller pieces, generating potential solutions for the pieces, integrating the pieces into overall solutions, and evaluating the solutions. For example, the project will study (a) whether crowds generate better ideas when they start with "seed" ideas from experts, (b) how certain kinds of expert knowledge can be encoded in computer simulation models that crowds can use on their own, and (c) to what degree expert evaluations can be approximated by combinations of semi-experts, novices, and software tools.

The results are expected to include (a) open source software applicable to many sustainability and other challenges, (b) a set of processes and methodologies with which communities can effectively use this software, and (c) a diverse community of tens of thousands of people using this approach to address issues associated with trending environmental changes. The primary intellectual contribution of the proposed work will be better processes and computer tools for creating on-line communities that combine the best features of both experts and crowds to solve complex societal problems. Many aspects of the technical and organizational approaches to be studied should be of interest to researchers in a variety of fields, including collective intelligence, computer-supported cooperative work, human computer interaction, computer science, engineering, organizational design, psychology, and public policy. By engaging students and the general public to come up with credible ideas for what people can do about complex problems, this project will help educate a much broader community about the actual issues involved. If successful, the work will likely lead to the development of better approaches for complex societal problems than any that would otherwise have been developed. Many aspects of the results will be applicable to a wide range of domains such as education, healthcare, and business problems like strategic planning and budgeting.