Knowledge commons

How can we take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge that circulates around the web? Media anthropologist Stefana Broadbent recounts two different approaches: the “extractive” used by Amazon Mechanical Turk, and the collaborative one of Wikipedia, “Fix my street” and “If you want to”.

A vast wealth of knowledge, spread everywhere, that addresses all kinds of subjects and offers information and practical explanations on every aspect of human thinking.

The first to foresee it was French philosopher Pierre Levy who already in 1994, when the Web was still accessible to only a few, predicted the advent of a “collective intelligence” that would open up new perspectives on ideas and find solutions precluded to purely solitary research. The journalist John Battelle in his 2005 book The Search, dedicated to Google, renamed it “the power of the mass” to indicate how the increase in users of the Web would inevitably lead to insertion on the net of contents of every type, even more specialised and less noted. Any passion or interest, even the most bizarre, would find in the immensity of the Web at least one or more follower just as interested.

Today this wealth circulates around the channels of the web in thousands of different forms: it is visible to all and easy to access. It is no longer a dream or a hypothesis but a very concrete reality that can be analysed and evaluated. This is exactly what Stefana Broadbent has been doing for some years, a media anthropologist, head of the department of collective intelligence at Nesta in London, one of the most active charities for promoting innovation, recently a guest at Meet the Media Guru at the Palazzo Affari and Giureconsulti in Milan.

“Today knowledge is transmitted increasingly often outside traditional contexts. Thanks to the web we have available a great resource, close to every one of us and ready to use – explained Broadbent, author also of an essay published in Italy Internet, work, private life (Il Mulino, 2012) – it is precisely the vast diffusion of such knowledge and its being outside of a specific context that constitutes the great novelty of the scenario we find ourselves in”. So it is time to ask how this wealth is actually exploited and what prerogatives the most successful services have. A case in point is certainly that of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia created by the actual users that today has more than 35 million entries and continues to grow. But the scholar invites us to also consider the case of open-source software, made public by the authors themselves in such a way that others can make modifications or improve it: among the most well-known examples are the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser.

The projects and services that in various forms exploit or create collective intelligence now present quite diverse characteristics and aims. “In many cases it is a case of interrogating the “crowd” on the Net to obtain various services or answers to questions: it's what I call an “extractive” approach to collective intelligence” explains Broadbent. An example is the service of Amazon Mechanical Turk that fragments work into thousands of small parts in such a way that it can be done by an undefined quantity of people, or the database of answers Quora that puts together a wide variety of questions with answers from both experts and ordinary users. “A project like Wikipedia is remade also in a different model, that of the construction of knowledge in a way that is totally distributed and collaborative”. In this second case there is no specific request but rather a voluntary collaboration in the creation of knowledge and services useful for all. Also taking this direction is the Open street map service – also available in Italy – of mapping territory that anyone can contribute to after a brief initial training. The participation of the citizen is even more concrete in Fix my Street active in Great Britain and in a large number of other countries (not yet Italy) where anyone can highlight problems, faults, or malfunctions of their area so that they can be fixed.

But in this panorama of initiatives, abundant and ever-increasing, is it possible to identify factors that determine the success of a project of collective intelligence? “An initial consideration is that in general the successful projects are those that envisage a combination of online and offline events, as in the case of the Open street map, that periodically organises sessions of collective mapping in which the participants can meet up in person and work together. Another fundamental aspect is the presence of a very clear brief for shared action and adequate tools,” explains Broadbent. It is in this latter area that the most significant gaps occur and present tools often prove to be inadequate. “We need to manage the quantity and complexity of the data collected and also encourage forms of participation of greater quality, that for example make possible the collaboration of entire groups and not just individuals. I think that it is necessary to do a lot of work on the design of these tools”. The most probable direction?

“That of increasingly sophisticated graphic interfaces able to present a large quantity of data. Very often the risk is that the suggestions of the citizens are passed over by the decision-makers because they do not take account of all the constraints and problems of the actual situation they apply to. My dream is that whoever collaborates can do so with an adequate knowledge of all the variables at play, visualised in an intuitive way with attractive graphics so that the contribution offered ends up being genuinely useful”.

A strong supporter of the social value of projects of this kind, Stefana Broadbent is head of “If you want to” a collaborative platform for gathering and promoting digital projects that helps to reduce the exploitation of environmental resources, waste, emissions and encourages environmental regeneration. The project has come about with the idea of building a kind of shared database of initiatives in the field of environmental protection in such a way as to help the most broadest possible participation.

Stefana Broadbent: knowledge commons e sapere collettivo
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