Swarm Creativity Blog

On November 30 the Swiss will vote on another highly restrictive immigration initiative, the Ecopop initiative, which wants to restrict net immigration to Switzerland to 0.2 % annually. Today a former student asked me about the chances of Ecopop succeeding, which triggered me to check the Internet about the outcome, using the social networks on the Web (mostly news Web sites) and Twitter as a proxy for the opinion of the Swiss on this topic 13 days before the vote. Counting the number of search hits in Google brought 645,000 hits for "ecopop ja”, and 377,000 hits for “ecopop nein". This would suggest a vote for Ecopop, at least among the German speaking part of Switzerland. But checking the Web site network using Condor, and measuring betweenness centrality of the query "Ecopop ja" in the top 20 Websites brought up by Google, identified a clear majority against Ecopop (33,000 agains 22,000). The picture below also shows the main Websites for and against Ecopop...

The Home Visiting program of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) helps parents and children of disadvantaged families to lay the groundwork for a better future for their children. As part of the Home Visiting program, MCHB has launched a Collaborative Innovation and Improvement Network ( HV-COIIN ). This MIT video gives an overview about the use of COINs in healthcare. Among others, HV-COIIN draws on earlier experiences creating COINs from a project on Chronic Collaborative Care Networks ( C3N ) originally for patients with Crohn’s disease. In the HV-COIN knowledge sharing of great ideas by home visitors and social workers is already happening in conference calls and on the   HV-COIN Web site which will provide an online forum where these ideas can be shared. However, to make the innovation process more sustainable, two issues need to be addressed: (1) From sharing of ideas to implementation of ideas: While home visitors from Local Implementing Agencies (LIAs)...

The madness of the crowd or the wisdom of the swarm,..... either way, somebody got $40k on kickstarter (and counting) for making potato salad .

Thanks to a student team in the COINs14 spring course   (Michael Sidler , Simon Fluehmann, Yulia Schmitt, Yan Zheng, Nicolas Zehnder, Silvio Pirozzi) and Stefan Wagner from FHNW the Wikishistory functionality described in a previous blog post is now online as a Java Applet.   In order for the applet to work, the Java security settings on the Mac/Windows have to be adjusted The applet visualizes the World’s leaders trough the ages, visualized as a Wikipedia social network, with links between leaders when two leaders lived in the same period (say at 1000AD) and have a link to each other’s Wikipedia page. A time slider allows the user to jump to a year, from 2000BC to 2000AD, in 10 year increments. Afterwards the leaders of that period are loaded, and their social network is constructed. Try it out, the applet works best with Firefox

In social networks, new ideas and thoughts can spread quickly. An analysis of this diffusion can answer various questions, such as the important topics or the speed of their propagation.  It is of particular interest to find people who successfully share their own ideas and concepts. These people can influence others to change their behavior and bring in new terms to the communication network. This post describes my master's thesis in which the goal lies in finding the most influential people in social networks. The thesis has been written in collaboration between the MIT and the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and the results are now implemented as new functionality in Condor 3. Various communication networks were used as test data to validate the use of this new metric as a meaningful measurement of influence. Defining influence Different applications use different definitions for the term “influence”. For example the so-called Klout Score calcu...

My friend Geoff Dutton just finished describing our analysis of Cowbird , an online community of storytellers, envisioned as an anti-Facebook by Jonathan Harris of wefeelfine fame. We basically found that this is an intrinsically motivated group of writers, who use writing as a therapy for soothing the soul. It is a close-knit community, with writers doubling up as readers of the stories of others, which they can "love". It seems that writing on cowbird is done mostly for being "loved". Somewhat worryingly for cowbird, the average number of loves per story seems to be doing down, as is the overall positivity and emotionality of the stories. Here is Geoff's  story about cowbird on cowbird .

All software development has been done by Patrick de Boer The goal of this project at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to create an interactive history book of the most important people of all times from Wikipedia. In a first step towards that goal, we focus on the English Wikipedia, extracting its 800,000 people pages. In future work we intend to repeat this process with other language Wikipedias, to get an understanding of the key influencers over time in different cultures. In this first prototype created from the English Wikipedia, all people pages are dated, by extracting the dates of birth and of death of each individual. Moreover, the links originating and pointing to their Wikipedia page are gathered. Using this information, 4900 networks through history, from 3000 BC to 1900 CE are calculated, as shown in figure 1. From all the links originating and pointing back to a particular people page, only the links to and from people living at the sam...