VIRTUALIŲ BENDRUOMENIŲ KOLEKTYVINIO INTELEKTO GALIMYBĖS IR IŠŠŪKIAI SPRĘSTI VISUOMENEI AKTUALIAS PROBLEMAS
POTENTIAL AND CHALLENGES OF WEB-BASED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE TO TACKLE SOCIETAL PROBLEMS

Summary/Abstract: Purpose – to research what are conditions and challenges for collective intelligence (hereinafter – CI), i.e., emerging applying social technologies, to tackle societal problems. Several objectives were set in order to achieve the goal: to analyze the scientific concepts of CI and its contents; to summarize possibilities and challenges of application of CI in large­ scale online argumentation; following theoretical attitudes towards CI, to analyze Lithuanian praxis of application of CI technologies in large­scale online argumentation. Methodology – the methods of document analysis and content analysis of virtual community projects were applied. Theoretical analysis enabled recognition of CI phenomena and the variety of interpretations on CI as well as preconditions and difficulties to be tackled in order to ensure effective application of CI technologies in the processes of different policies design and/or societal problem solving. Having theoretical analysis as a base, the authors researched how the theoretical frameworks correspond to practices of Lithuanian virtual community projects, which are oriented to identification and analysis of relevant problems that communities are facing. Findings – scientific documents analysis demonstrates the variety of possible interpretations of CI. Such interpretations depend on the researcher’s attitudes towards this phenomenon: some authors explain CI in a very broad sense not including the aspects of social technologies. However, in the last decades, with the emergence of the Internet, social technologies have become concurrent dimension of CI. The main principles of Web­based CI are geographically spread users and a big number of them. Materialization of these principles ensures variety of elements needed for emerging of CI. There are diverse web­based mediums, where CI is being developed. However, not all of them ensure collective action, which is obligatory for CI. Researchers have analyzed characteristics of diverse web­based projects, which include attributes of CI, and came up with relatively small number of common elements calling them CI genes, and combination of different genes was called genome. The genes were classified using two pairs of questions: who are performing tasks? Why they are doing it? And what is being done? How it is being performed? Responses to these questions gives information on what principles are followed when CI is emerging in a particular web­based project. This information is crucial when systems, which are oriented to emergence and application of CI, are being designed.

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