Putting the pieces back together again: Contest webs for large-scale problem solving

Thomas W. Malone, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Robert J. Laubacher, Laur Hesse Fisher, Patrick De Boer, Yue Han, W. Ben Towne

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

A key issue, whenever people work together to solve a complex problem, is how to divide the problem into parts done by different people and combine the parts into a solution for the whole problem. This paper presents a novel way of doing this with groups of contests called contest webs. Based on the analogy of supply chains for physical products, the method provides incentives for people to (a) reuse work done by themselves and others, (b) simultaneously explore multiple ways of combining interchangeable parts, and (c) work on parts of the problem where they can contribute the most. The paper also describes a field test of this method in an online community of over 50,000 people who are developing proposals for what to do about global climate change. The early results suggest that the method can, indeed, work at scale as intended.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Pages1661-1674
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343350
DOIs
StatePublished - 25 Feb 2017
Event2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017 - Portland, United States
Duration: 25 Feb 20171 Mar 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Conference

Conference2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period25/02/171/03/17

Keywords

  • Climate change
  • Collective intelligence
  • Contest webs
  • Contests
  • Coordination
  • Incentives
  • Knowledge reuse

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