Assignment 10, Beth

A collaborative problem-solving task that I was confronted with this past week is scoring at sailing regattas. Usually it is the race committee’s job to watch the boats at the finish line, call them when they cross the line, and write down the sail or boat number in the order they finish to tally up the overall scores. This weekend, when one of the boats had something break, the boat and sail numbers did not match. When tallying up the scoring at the end of the day, we realized that there were some issues with the scoring because of repeating or missing numbers and we only had one person’s scribbles to figure out the real results. On the second day, besides agreeing to identify the boats based on sail number only, we came up with a collaborative system using available technology to help our scoring. We had the race committee write down their observed results on paper, like usual. We also had a separate motor boat on the other end of the line write down what they believed to be the finish results. They radioed their results to the race committee to form a consensus and then the final results were emailed to shore via blackberries. The results were finally confirmed over the phone.

Vieweg et al. define collective intelligence as an instance where a “distributed group of people who exhibited problem-solving capabilities come together.” Essentially, the system we created for scoring the second day of races used this concept to use many people’s observations to reach a more reliable consensus, similar, although less serious in nature, to how the Virginia Tech on-line groups aimed to use collective intelligence to gather more accurate information on the deaths of their classmates. The communication about the finishing results demonstrates issues similar to concepts discussed by Vieweg et al. about the communication around the VT incident. Authority was already known in this case, as the race committee always has the final say about the results. Over the radio, we listened for confirmation of identity to know that the people we were talking to were authoritative sources. Although it was a collaborative effort, accuracy was the goal and listening to both boat’s results even though it was the race committee’s authority proved to make the results more accurate. As far as trust goes, we trusted each other to make the best judgment about the order of finishing because any mistakes would reflect badly on our sailing program. Although the issue did not have the serious air of a campus shooting, it was in everyone’s best interest to provide reliable information.

Our scoring system demonstrates some redundancy, but it uses different forms of technology to allow distributed problem-solving to provide a higher amount of accuracy for our results.