Designing for Collective Intelligence and Community Resilience on Social Networks

The popularity and ubiquity of social networks has enabled a new form of decentralised online collaboration: groups of users gathering around a central theme and working together to solve problems, complete tasks and develop social connections. Groups that display such ‘organic collaboration’ have been shown to solve tasks quicker and more accurately than other methods of crowdsourcing. They can also enable community action and resilience in response to different events, from casual requests to emergency response and crisis management. However, engaging such groups through formal agencies risks disconnect and disengagement by destabilising motivational structures. This paper explores case studies of this henomenon, reviews models of motivation that can help design systems to harness these groups and proposes a framework for lightweight engagement using existing platforms and social networks.