Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users – a great blog that only tangentially relates to journalism proper, but relates a LOT to the future of the mediasphere – does a good job of dissecting the concept of the “wisdom of crowds” in The “Dumbness of Crowds.” If you’re not aware of the wisdom of crowds, or crowdsourcing, or whatever moniker it wears this week, here’s an earlier post we wrote: Crowdsourcing the news. #

Here’s a key quote from my perspective: #

Art isn’t made by committee. #

Great design isn’t made by consensus. #

True wisdom isn’t captured from a crowd. #

At least not when the crowd is acting as a single entity. Clearly there IS wisdom in the many as long as you don’t “poison” the crowd by forcing them to agree (voting doesn’t mean agreeing). According to Surowiecki, even just sharing too much of your own specialized knowledge with others in the group is enough to taint the wisdom and dumb-down the group. #

She gives some good examples of what she means by the “wisdom” of crowds and what the “dumbness” of crowds might look like, i.e. “Collective Intelligence” is all the photos on Flickr, taken by individuals on their own, and the new ideas created from that pool of photos (and the API). “Dumbness of Crowds” is expecting a group of people to create and edit a photo together. #

I’m curious to see how college media might adopt and adapt the “wisdom of crowds” approach to anything in the news process – design, interaction, story development. Soliciting input and sifting through that input to find the best solutions to problems is a relatively easy way to leverage some of the “wisdom” in the crowd. I’m not aware of any current examples in the college media ranks. If anyone knows of such an example, e-mail or put it in the comments. #

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