CIorg: Collective Intelligence In Organizations
Tools and Studies
Gregorio Convertino Antonietta Grasso
Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Research Center Europe
convertino@parc.com antonietta.grasso@xrce.xerox.com
David R Millen Ed H. Chi
IBM Research Palo Alto Research Center
david_r_millen@us.ibm.com echi@parc.com
ABSTRACT
Web 2.0 tools are penetrating into organizations after their
successful adoption in the consumer domain (e.g., social
networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks;
wiki-based editing). Some of these new tools and the
collaborative processes that they support on the large scale
are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI). The
workshop brings together leading researchers and designers
who are studying or developing CI tools aimed at workers
in organizations. The goal is to further articulate the
emerging research agenda for this new CSCW area and
define new observed forms of CI in organization. Studies of
communities, CI tools, and new methods are discussed.
Author Keywords
Collective intelligence, CSCW, organization, enterprise2.0
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
The vision of enabling Collective Intelligence though
technology is not new. Early research on collaborative
computing or groupware during the 70s had already
proposed the possibility of allowing large groups of
dislocated people to carry out complex tasks by
collaborating and coordinating each others’ activities [9].
Over the last decade, this vision has become a feasible
reality; especially after interactive Web 2.0 tools were
introduced and adopted. Crowds of non-expert users
became able to generate their own content, share it, and
collectively organize it in tools such as Wikis, Blogs, Q&A
forums, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Twitter.
1
Giorgio De Michelis
University of Milano –
Bicocca
gdemich@disco.unimib.it
As these Web 2.0 tools became widely adopted, new forms
of collective intelligent behaviors have started to appear.
Systems like Wikipedia have allowed million of people to
collaboratively create and organize content with
mechanisms that do not fix a priori what the final outcome
will look like or by whom or when it should be produced.
Using tools such as del.icio.us or Flickr, large communities
of users have shared, respectively, their bookmarks or their
photos, and have categorized them with user-defined tags.
As a result, rich corpora of shared annotated resources have
been created for these communities to reuse and augment.
These tools, the large-scale processes that they support, and
the value they produce are examples of what has been
recently referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI) [10]. The
research on these early successful examples of ‘CI in the
wild’ (i.e., the public web) has started to highlight which
social and technical preconditions need to be in place for
such intelligent behaviors to appear (see research on
Wikipedia). The behaviors are referred to as ‘intelligent’
because they enhance people’s abilities to adapt and control
their social, informational, and physical environment.
As a follow up of a first workshop held at ACM CSCW
2010 [4] and the planning of a journal issue on the topic,
this workshop at ACM Group 2010 provides a forum for
discussing novel tools, studies, and methods for supporting
or investigating CI in organizations (e.g., large business
enterprises, government or military institutions, or local
communities). The workshop brings together leading
researchers and designers who are studying or developing
CI tools aimed at workers in organizations. The objective is
to further articulate the research agenda for this new area.
While we keep in the background general research
questions about CI (e.g., What defines the forms of CI that
are enabled by new web 2.0 technologies?) [10], we bring
to the foreground specific questions about CI in the
organization: What distinguishes these forms of CI from
those enabled in the consumer Web? What properties define
them? What conditions facilitate or hinder them? A longer
list of questions for the invited contributions is provided
below.
Examples of CI Tools in Organizations
Examples of adaptations of web 2.0 tools to the new
context of large organizations include tools such as IBM’s
social bookmarking software Dogear [11], wiki platforms
such as Wikispaces (wikispaces.com) or TikiWiki
(tikiwiki.org), and tagging tools for sharing using email
such as Mail2Tag [12].
Emulating the success of social network systems for
consumers such as Facebook or LinkedIn, new tools such as
IBM’s Social Blue (or Beehive) [14] or Novell’s Pulse are
being proposed for the enterprise. Similarly, in
microblogging, the success of Twitter as consumer tool has
motivated the introduction of tools such as Yammer in
enterprises. These tools help managers with project
management and awareness of multiple ongoing activities
in the organization. Moreover, several commercial web
platforms targeted at enterprises have appeared over the
past years, such as IBM’s LotusLive, Microsoft’s
SharePoint, Jive’s Social Business Software, and SAP’s
NewWeaver. These platforms include social functions that
can be considered CI tools. Finally, a few exemplars of CI
tools native to organizations have started to emerge. These
include Idea Management System for supporting grassroots
innovation in large enterprises such as IBM, Dell, Microsoft
or tools for e-democracy or collaborative decision-making
in local communities [7].
The ongoing process of diffusion of Web 2.0 tools from the
consumers’ space to the organizations’ space is still lacking
an organized body of research literature, which can orient
design in this new domain. To start filling this gap, this
workshop invites recent contributions aimed at studying or
supporting CI in the organization. In fact, the organization
is likely to pose distinctive requirements and constraints for
intelligent behaviors to emerge. For example, the
experience of the Web has shown that letting behavior
emerge is a winning strategy when a large population of
users is in place who can “naturally” let order, as well as
quality control, materialize from the bottom. Instead,
organizations such as business enterprises, government,
educational, or military institutions have structures that are
different from the web: the scale is different, a top-down
control structure is already in place, and the employees
have specific motivations, skills, and duties.
WORKSHOP THEMES
Known Properties of CI
Two general properties can be observed in socio-technical
systems that exhibited CI in the wild: First, the bottom-up,
non-scripted genesis of the community of users, which self-
organizes, and, second, the formation of a common capital
(e.g., re-usable knowledge) via selective accumulation of
shared by-products of individual activities, which may be
motivated initially by personal utility. In fact, individual
consumers adopt CI tools for the specific purpose for which
it was initially designed (e.g., shared editing or
bookmarking), but at the same time the tool enables the
accumulation of critical by-products such as detailed
interaction traces and individual contributions (e.g., a wiki
page, a bookmark). When aggregated, these become a
source of further information that can be then reused by the
community.
Distinctive Properties of Organizations
As a new context for CI, enterprises such as private
organizations or public institutions have unique properties:
People. The people using technology are knowledge
workers, who perform specific and stable jobs. They
generally know each other (even indirectly), are paid to
work, and are part of a reporting structure. Their
contributions are monitored and evaluated. Moreover, in the
organization, there is an emphasis on utilizing teams, task
forces, and communities as a strategy to improve
performance. Such work units are not formed on the basis
of personal interest, but are assembled by the management,
given the functions needed and the experts available.
Typically, the workers have to coordinate with (and rely on)
others for the organization to be productive as a whole.
Tools and tasks. Both the tasks performed and the tools
used (email, phone, content editing tools, databases) are
non-discretionary. Typically, they are assigned by the
management and not chosen by the workers. Past research
has already pointed to the potential conflicts between who
gets the benefits and who bears the costs of using the tools
(e.g., [8]). Also distinctive is that the tasks are information
intensive. Knowledge workers in global enterprises
increasingly need to make sense of large amounts of
information from multiple channels or information tools.
Goodness criteria. The criteria to evaluate and predict the
goodness of technology are also different. In the consumer
space, these are mainly the utility to the user, quality of user
experience (e.g., simplicity and fun), and social benefits. In
the organizations, the key criteria are also the worker’s
productivity (e.g., worker’s output and workload), the
organization’s productivity (i.e., ROI), political returns,
security, and compatibility with the legacy infrastructure.
Therefore additional constraints for CI tools in
organizations include the compatibility with prior tools,
security, costs of maintaining new tools, and the fit with the
current management structure, work practices, and
motivational mechanisms.
CI in Task Forces
Task forces represent a tactic that is currently used to
enhance the CI of organizations. A task force is a
cooperative work unit assembled to perform a complex task
or activity. The term indicates a temporary, ad-hoc unit that
works as a committee of professionals on a given project
(e.g., develop a report on climate change, evaluate
opportunities in a new business area). The same
professional typically contributes to multiple task forces at
the same time. In fact, the managers of large organizations
rely on task forces to coordinate expert work around
complex tasks and at the same time make optimal reuse of
highly skilled professionals [e.g., 13]. Task forces tend to
cross boundaries within the organization (e.g., involving
people from different company departments) [3]. The
recurrent need to find experts [1] and the demanding and
constrained conditions of the experts who work in multiple
task forces makes these workers a good target for CI tools.
CI in Communities of Practice and Learning
Enabling forms of CI in organizations (i.e., new skills and
adaptive behaviors) that persist and improve across
succeeding task forces and individual tasks requires
appropriate social and technological engineering. Future
design of CI tools can build on prior research in areas such
as communities of practice and learning, social networks
and information foraging (e.g., [13]). In fact, according to
Wenger, the communities of practices within the
organizations are key mechanism used for building their
competence and adapting such competence over time (i.e.,
communities for professional development). He defines
organizations as “social designs directed at practice” [17].
Thus, new collaborative tools that support learning and
development in persistent communities of professionals
can, over time, promote new forms of CI.
Studying and Designing for CI
The design of CI tools for organizations that, for example,
enhance the performance of domain-specific task forces in
the short term and support the development of communities
of practices in the long term is likely to benefit from a
detailed understanding of the attributes, tools, and work
practices that characterize current task forces and
communities in organizations. This understanding can point
the designers toward the needs that CI tools might address
and can help to smoothly integrate the tools with existing
work processes. A deeper understanding of current
practices can help answering foundational questions about
CI tools for organizations such as:
• What defines the forms of CI that emerge in specific
organizations? How are they different from other forms
of CI observed in the consumer Web?
• What are the organizational processes that are best
suited to bottom-up organization and what features of
CI tools can capture these?
• What is the degree of domain modeling that the tools
need to support to leverage content created and shared?
• What are available traces from previous activities and
how they can be exploited for the current activity and
to organize the dynamic knowledge being created?
• What visualizations and abstractions can help to
monitor and make sense of the activities of others?
• How do factors such as trust, motivation, attribution,
and traceability affect information and activity flows in
organizations? How can these factors be ‘designed in’
CI tools?
• What mix of research methods, such field studies and
logs analysis, are suitable for CI research and design?
3
Given the socio-technical nature of these research
questions, we believe that multi-method research agenda
that integrates data from field studies, interviews, surveys,
and computer logs is best suited to inform the design and
evaluation of prototypes and thus build suitable CI tools for
both the workers and their organization.
The workshop organizers have conducted various studies of
computer-supported teams, task forces, and communities in
the industry (e.g., IBM, Xerox) or in public institutions
(e.g., public administration, universities, emergency
management organizations) and have extensive experience
in design of collaborative tools [2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 16].
WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES, GOALS, AND PAPERS
The workshop is held over a full day. The agenda allocates
maximum time to small group discussion and
brainstorming.
The workshop assembles a diverse set of participants with a
research or an applied interest for CI in organizations.
Contributions pertain to the following categories:
 Empirical studies of communities or collaborative
practices in organizations: e.g., case studies illustrating
practices and pointing to specific design requirements.
 Designs of new software tools or proof-of-concept
prototypes supporting CI in communities of workers;
or in-depth evaluations of tools already deployed that
support CI in organization.
 Theoretical contributions on CI, crowdsourcing, and
community-based learning in organizations, which can
directly inform design and research.
 Cases of multidisciplinary research showing the
interplay between field studies, analysis of
requirements, and development of CI tools.
Key thematic areas of interest of the workshop include:
1. Feeding CI. Knowledge creation, capture and use:
infrastructures; e.g., Q&A, sharing and lurking in CMS.
2. Exploiting and institutionalizing CI. Knowledge reuse
and community development; e.g., studies of wikis, tools
for communities, business process, organizational memory.
3. Advanced CI functions. Decision-making, voting,
planning, e.g., collective sensemaking; semantic web tools.
4. Methods. Methods for measuring CI key factors; e.g.,
critical mass, incentives, quality, ownership; methods for
developing CI tools; e.g., scenarios, personas, storytelling.
Workshop venue and Papers Accepted
The accepted participants prepare a brief summary and read
all the accepted proposals prior to the workshop. The details
about the workshop agenda and the proceedings with the
accepted papers are published on a public website [19].
 Workshop papers accepted
Cabitza F., Simone C. Web-Based Surveys In Medical
Communities As Lightweight Tools To Promote
Collective Awareness On Medical Daily Practices
Chidlovskii B., Faddoul, JB. Sharing the Collective
Intelligence between E-mail Applications
Convertino G., Hanrahan B. Kong N., Weksteen T.,
Bouchard G., Archambeau C., Chi E.H., Mail2Wiki:
Low-Cost Sharing and Organization on Wikis
Damianos L.E., Holtzblatt L.J. Measuring Community
Success: One Size Does Not Fit All
Gartrell M., Beach A. Ramanarayanankrishnaniyer J.,
Xing X., Lv Q., Han R., Mishra S., Seada K. Integrating
Wikipedia, Facebook, and Other Personal
Online Context into Collaborative E-Brainstorming
Hanrahan B., Quintana-Castillo R., Stewart M., Perez-
Quinones, M.A. Wiki Atoms: Contributions to Wikis as
Atomic Units
Huh J., Ackerman M.S. Using Collective Intelligence for
Supporting Diabetes Patients
Klein M. Using Metrics to Enable Large-Scale
Deliberation
Oral T., Shami N.S. Dealing with the Cold Start Problem
when Providing Personalized Enterprise Content
Recommendations
Vivacqua A.S., Expedito C., Galuzzo F., Borges, M.R.S.,
da Silva, S.T.F. Moving from Ideas to Proposals
PROFILE OF ORGANIZERS
Gregorio Convertino is a research scientist at PARC. His
group, Augmented Social Cognition, investigates and
develops new social tools for enterprises or consumers.
Antonietta Grasso is a research manager at the Xerox
Research Centre Europe. Her group, Work Practice
Technology, informs the design of tools in support of cross-
organizational teams through field studies.
Giorgio De Michelis teaches Theoretical Computer
Science and Interaction Design at the University of Milano
- Bicocca. He funded a start up, which built a new operating
system that affords new CI functions: www.itsme.it
Ed H. Chi is a senior research scientist and area manager of
the Augmented Social Cognition team at PARC.
David R Millen is group manager of Social Software
Research at IBM T J Watson Research Center.
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19. http://www.parc.com/ciorg