Swarm Creativity Blog

The race to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senatorial seat in Washington has turned into a real shocker. At the outset, it seemed clear that in deeply democratic Massachusetts only a Democrat could become the next senator. As of today, it seems to be the other way. Republican candidate Scott Brown is ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 5 points . I wanted to know what the Web would tell us. The picture below shows the daily betweenness values of the two candidates, we can cleary see how Scott Brown is gaining on Martha Coakley. It seems however, that there is a silver lining for Ms. Coakley, at least in the blogosphere. The next picture shows her centrality as of today (January 15). She is ahead by 6 percentage points. The last picture, just for fun, shows the Blogpost-Network leading to the percentages. The red dots are the Web sites promoting both candidates. The brown dots promote Mr Brown, but it seems that the green (should really be blue) Web sites carry some more weight, leadin...

Why do people collaboratively engage in innovative tasks? What’s the motivation to work together to develop something new? After all, if I do everything by myself, I will reap all the rewards for myself, and don’t have to share. Nevertheless, humans are the most social species of all, and progress is only possible by collectively creating new things “standing on the shoulders of giants”, by learning from what others have done, and apply it in novel ways. According to my colleagues at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Tom Malone , Rob Laubacher , and Chris Dellarocas there are three main reasons why people engage in collective intelligence systems: Money – financial gain is a strong motivator for people participating in markets and traditional organizations, either for direct payment, or for future payment, e.g. acquiring new skills. Glory – getting recognition and building up a reputation can be an important motivator. Love – love can be an important motivator, be it beca...

March 7th, 2010, the 82nd Academy Awards, commonly known as Oscars, will be given out for best picture, for best actor and actress, and in 21 other categories. Two years ago we successfully predicted who would win an Oscar Award, almost two months before the Awards were actually given out. This blog post contains our first predictions for the 2010 Oscars, more than three months before the Awards will be actually given out. There are other places on the Web also making Oscar predictions, for example movie site moviefone and Internet betting site intrade : While the above predictions are made by experts (moviefone) and people placing bets on the outcome (intrade), our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says with her/his influence. Below are our combined coolhunting results, based on evaluating the buzz in the Oscar Forum in the Internet movie database imdb.com an...

The principles of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism have many parallels with the ways how COINs operate. The way is the goal - Tao means “way”, and “way” is the cornerstone of Taoism. This is very different from Western philosophies, where the “being” and “truth” are in the center. In Taoism, on the other hand, “the way is the goal”, this means it’s not the solution, which is important, but the way to get to the solution. COINs achieve their big vision in many small incremental steps along the way. It is the way, the joy of completing small incremental steps together, which are the main motivators for COIN members. Working extremely hard in the company of likeminded people and reaching a goal together is immensely rewarding. This way of working under positive stress is similar to the concept of “ flow ” defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, people are most happy when they are in the state of flow – a state of complete absorption with the activity at hand ...

I am writing this blog post on my way back from the first Conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks COINs2009 . It was a cool event, taking place Oct. 8-11 2009 at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. SCAD was a fitting place and perfect host for this conference, with its mascot the bee, paragon of collaborative swarms. The themes of the COINs conference cover a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration. Thinking about these topics in the plane on the trip back to Boston, it dawned on me that the time has come to put these topics into a solid scientific framework. While it has been scientifically recognized that swarms of bees are better thought of as one big superorganism, it is only now that similar insights are coming up for the human superorganism . Slowly this human superorganism is starting to become self aware with the ind...

Tomorrow September 27th, 2009, there are elections to the German parliament. It's the conservative (by German standards) CDU/CSU led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, against the social democrats (SPD) led by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, with the liberal democrats (FDP,Guido Westerwelle) and the Green party (Jürgen Trittin) as minor players. Predictions still seem to project a win of CDU, although it is not clear if CDU and FDP together will get a clear majority. A quick coolhunting in blogs seems to speak a clear language: Angela Merkel seems the clear leader, being in a sphere of her own, and her competitors huddled together in the other corner. SPD candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier has a large support network, although of lesser influence. But wait! What we are looking at above is what the WORLD thinks and blogs - and there Angela Merkel, as the incumbent Chancellor, has a huge advantage. If we zoom in on German language blogs, using the German title "Bundeskanzl...

In the last three posts I have looked at what the crowd on the Web was saying about the chances of the 3 main candidates for Swiss Federal Councilor in the elections of Sept. 16 to succeed Bundesrat Pascal Couchepin. And note that we had to predict what the crowd was thinking what the 248 members of the Swiss National Assembly would be doing. The ranking was (see three previous posts): 1. Urs Schwaller 2. Christian Luescher 3. Didier Burkhalter If you look at the voting in the Assembly yesterday, it is (from Wikipedia) So the crowd PERFECTLY predicted the voting pattern in round 1! The group dynamics in the Assembly in the succeeding rounds, and in particular the behavior of individual people like the withdrawal of Christian Luescher after round 3, the crowd can NOT predict, that's up to Mr Luescher - there are still good uses for the crystal ball.