» Tap the Collective Sheds Light on the Power of Collective Intelligence

Left to Right: Adam Siegel from Inkling Markets, Melody Hildebrandt from Transcapitalist, Ryan Hahn from World Bank, Robin Hanson from Consensus Point, Shyam Sankar from Palantir Technologies, Emma Antunes from NASA, Don Burke from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and David Resseguie from Sensorpedia

BOALT co-sponsored a D.C. event last night called “Tap the Collective” along with Palantir Technologies.  The event which was hosted by Adam Siegel, founder of Inkling Markets and Melody Hildebrandt, founder of Transcapitalist, was by far the most interesting event that I have been to since I moved to D.C. a year ago.

For starters, it was a fresh new crowd.  It was the first time that I was really able to understand how large enterprise organizations are adopting some of the most recent new media technologies and realized that although it may be a slippery slope, we’re making a lot of headway.  The main focus of the night was how to use “collective intelligence solutions to enable decision-makers to efficiently gather actionable information without the political overhead that usually accompanies meetings, status reports, emails, and other standard communication methods.”

The thing that impressed me the most was how large organizations were using prediction markets.  Ryan Hahn from World Bank discussed how they were using Inkling Markets internally to predict different organizational issues.  Prediction Markets, as defined by Wikpedia, are “speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter).”

So what does this mean in plain English, an organization such as World Bank will use a group of employees and give them virtual currency to invest into the predictions of the outcome of different World Bank initiatives.  So for example, World Bank could predict a certain gross national product (GNP) and employees would either use their virtual currency to buy into that prediction or even short the prediction.

In the end, employees that make accurate predictions would in turn increase their virtual currency and be rewarded by that organization.  Prediction markets aren’t perfect though, they definitely present some challenges Hahn stated. For example, he posed the question internally, “Do you think X country will default?”, and that backfired on him since World Bank is an organization run by different countries and certain questions could be considered sensitive or hurt country relations.

Don Burke from the CIA, started Intellipedia, an internal Wiki that could be used by the intelligence community.  Intellipedia, which is updated by different intelligence agencies around the world, is a central location to keep information about countries and certain people of interest.  Don who’s been working on the project since 2005, stated that large organizations have certain process inefficiencies that prevent them from adopting new technologies and collective intelligence requires certain internal synergies to make them work.  He also stated, “Data begets more data which begets more knowledge.”

Lastly, I really enjoyed hearing about NASA’s internal social network, Spacebook, which is run by Emma Antunes.   NASA is currently using this social network to source information from its employees to continually optimize their organization by listening to what their employees have to say.

I want to thank, Melody Hildebrandt and Adam Siegel for organizing such a great panel and I urge all of you to watch the video of the event as soon as it’s ready.  I will update this post and twitter about it (@boalt), when I get a hold of it.