You might want to visit this wiki’s HomePage, active Discussion area, or a more detailed description of this concept at Community:CollectiveProblemSolving.
The increasing pervasiveness and complexity of online communities and SocialTechnology, and their power to produce emergent value suggests we may have new tools at our disposal for getting stuff done. Imagine, for example, that we could arrange all the aspects of an online environment in just the right way to stimulate the production of focused results similar to how, say, a traditional company is arranged to maximize profit.
Elements of these participatory environments invite online user contribution from one direction and aggregate value from another, but few environments are designed to move this participation towards a meaningful, intelligent result. The purpose of this wiki is to figure out how to do that.
For a more complete description of collective problem-solving, visit the Community:CollectiveProblemSolving page, where the discussion and interest for this wiki first began.
Since collective problem solving (CPS) is such a big-tent concept, it is important that we spend some time outlining its components to better understand the different areas for investigation and discussion. By identifying the key aspects of collective problem solving, we hope to provide a better overall picture of what an effective CPS environment might involve and must address.
This overall picture has the added benefit of inspiring participation in helping articulate the important details of each component (this is a wiki after all). For example, by pointing out that there are different types of problems to solve, readers might see the need to help describe and categorize typical problems and their associated best approaches.
Problem-solving can be a frightfully generic concept. There is such a wide range of problems and many different shapes of solutions. So many, in fact, that it is difficult to imagine how a single CPS approach could address them all. However, when you look carefully at the range of problems to solve, there emerge commonalities and patterns. Collectively, these problem types can be grouped together into a single ProblemSpace, where we can imagine addressing them all with problem-solving approaches that are perhaps customized to their unique characteristics.
In fact, one very important result of classifying problems and their desired solutions into types is so that we can use these differences to recognize the need for (and perhaps inspire) different approaches to addressing them. For example, widespread problems involving the need for cooperation may require the participation of many individuals in solving them, where problems isolated to individuals or teams may benefit from a wider audience, but not require it.
Characteristics of Problem Types (ProblemSpace):
Characteristics of Solution Types (SolutionShape):
When trying to solve a problem, what outcome are you looking for?
What concepts are valuable in solving problems and collectively aggregating value towards specific results? What have we learned about online communities and effective online user participation that may help point us in specific design directions? What overall approaches are used in traditional problem solving that could be appropriated (e.g. brainstorming).