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Broad Participation in Collective Problem Solving Can Influence Participants and Lead to Better Solutions: Evidence from the MIT Climate CoLab

Authors:
Erik Duhaime at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Erik Duhaime
Gary M. Olson at University of California, Irvine
Gary M. Olson
Thomas W. Malone at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thomas W. Malone
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Collective Intelligence 2015
Broad Participation in Collective Problem Solving Can
Influence Participants and Lead to Better Solutions:
Evidence from the MIT Climate CoLab
ERIK P. DUHAIME, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
GARY M. OLSON, University of California, Irvine
THOMAS W. MALONE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1. INTRODUCTION
The MIT Climate CoLab is crowdsourcing the problem of what humanity can do about global climate
change. It thus seeks to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world in
a form of very large-scale collective problem solving. Here, we offer the first comprehensive picture of
the characteristics and behavior of the Climate CoLab community. Through online surveys and
analysis of web activity, we find that the CoLab community is geographically diverse, highly educated,
and highly experienced with climate issues. We also find that people who are outside the usual
conversations about climate change are influenced by and contribute effectively to this collective
problem solving effort. More specifically, members who don’t have graduate education, don’t have
previous climate-related experience, and/or don’t live in the United States report significantly higher
levels of learning, belief change, and increase in climate-related activity as a result of their CoLab
participation. And, more importantly, we find that these members—in addition to women—are at
least as likely as others to submit high quality proposals.
The MIT Climate CoLab 1.1
The MIT Climate CoLab software platform (www.climatecolab.org) allows individuals and teams of
people from all over the world to develop proposals for what we should do about climate change
[Malone and Klein 2007, Introne, Laubacher and Malone 2011, Introne et al. 2011, Introne et al.
2013]. The proposals can include any ideas users have for technical, economic, political, or other
changes that should be made, as well as discussions of how the changes could be made, why they are
feasible, and why they are desirable. Each proposal has an associated discussion forum in which other
users can comment on the proposal, and all proposals have a wiki-like editing capability. In order to
keep the proposals grounded in the actual physical and economic reality we face, some proposals also
include computer simulation models to predict the potential impacts of the proposals on things like
temperature change, sea level rise, and various kinds of economic costs [Sewin et al. 2009, Sterman
2008, 2011, Sterman et al. 2012, 2013].
As of January 2015, more than 275,000 people from virtually every country in the world have visited
the CoLab, over 33,000 have registered as members, and over 950 have contributed to at least one
proposal. The primary driver of activity in the CoLab has been a series of four progressively more
elaborate annual contests. The most recent annual contest included 18 different sub-contests on
topics like how to reduce emissions in the transportation sector and how to change public attitudes
about climate change. Some of these contests were run in conjunction with organizations such as the
Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org) and Carbon War Room (www.carbonwarroom.com).
1
2 E.P. Duhaime, G.M. Olson and T.W. Malone
Collective Intelligence 2015
Each contest had advisors and judges – including experts from organizations like NASA, the World
Bank, MIT, and Stanford as well as one former US Secretary of State (Shultz), two former US
Congress members (Inglis and Sharp), and two former heads of state (Robinson and Bruntland).
After members submit proposals, judges select the most promising entries to be finalists and provide
feedback on how they can be improved. After the finalists revise their proposals, the judges select the
Judges’ Choice Awards and the community votes for the Popular Choice Awards. The Climate CoLab
offers a cash award to one Grand Prize winner and all the Popular and Judges’ Choice winners receive
opportunities to present their ideas to top experts and potential implementers, most recently at the
Crowds & Climate Conference at MIT in November 2014.
2. METHODS
We designed a brief 16-item survey to explore how the CoLab has affected both the beliefs and
behavior of registered members. In order to benchmark our sample, we started with two questions
that had been asked in a recent well-known study of the American public’s beliefs about climate
change [Leiserowitz et al. 2014]. Next we asked nine questions about the respondent’s attitudes and
behaviors before and after joining the CoLab and, finally, five general demographic questions. A total
of 12,713 e-mail invitations were sent to CoLab members who were registered as of July 2014. This is
substantially less than the 33,000 current members because the community has grown rapidly in
recent months. A total of 1,082 members responded to the survey, and we analyzed the data for all but
the 60 respondents who answered three or fewer questions.
We also sent a brief additional survey to all finalists and winners of CoLab contests who did not
respond to the initial survey in order to oversample these members on key questions of interest. An
additional 17 members responded to this follow-up survey, bringing our total sample to 1,039
members, but our sample sizes for questions in the next sections vary from 945 to 1018 because not all
respondents answered every question. The behavior of all registered members on the Climate CoLab
site is logged, including whether a person’s proposal is selected as a finalist or a winner. Thus, using
e-mail addresses, we were able to link the survey responses to the activity profiles for 990 of the 1,039
survey respondents.
3. RESULTS
Characteristics of CoLab Members 3.1
Respondents were 63% male, median age of 30-39, highly educated (58% attend or completed graduate
or professional school), and from all over the world (48% from outside the United States). While only
64% of Americans believe that global warming is happening and 60% of those think that it is at least
partially caused by human activities [Leiserowitz et al. 2014], almost all of our respondents believe
these things (97.2% and 97.5%, respectively). Members were also highly engaged in activities related
to climate change prior to joining the CoLab. Almost half (48.4%) of respondents reported that they
were previously engaged in activities related to climate change on at least a weekly basis, 23.4%
reported at least monthly, 20.5% occasionally, and just 7.7% reported that they engaged in no
activities related to climate change prior to joining the site.
The Effects of Membership on Learning, Beliefs, and Activity on Climate Change Issues 3.2
Broadly speaking, respondents reported high levels of learning since joining the site (71% said they
learned “A lot” or “Some” about climate change), substantial changes in beliefs (40% said that they
now think it is “more important for humans to take actions to reduce the bad effects of climate
Broad Participation in Online Problem Solving Benefits Participants and Leads to Better Solutions 3
Collective Intelligence 2015
change”), and substantial increases in activity related to climate change (46% reported that the CoLab
has had a moderate or considerable influence).
More interestingly, these changes were all greater for people who did not have graduate school
experience (t(815) = 2.86, p < .01; t(792) = 4.69, p < .01; and t(810) = 2.93, p < .01, respectively), had
little or not previous involvement with climate issues (t(488) = 1.80, p < .10, t(446) = 5.33, p < .01,
t(455) = 1.99, p < .05, respectively), and who were from outside the United States (t(832) = 5.55, p < .01,
t(861) = 8.75, p < .01, t(868) = 9.60, p < .01, respectively).
Characteristics of CoLab Contest Entrants and Finalists 3.3
We model a CoLab member’s decision to exert effort and submit a proposal to a CoLab contest as a
function of the characteristics of that member. Specifically we estimate the equation:
Pr (Submit Proposal) = β0 + β1Experience + β2Education + β3Gender + β4American + ε (Eq. 1)
where Experience is a dummy variable indicating whether a member was engaged in activities
related to climate change on a weekly or monthly basis prior to joining the CoLab, Education
indicates whether a member has graduate school experience, and Gender and American indicate
whether members are male and from the United States, respectively. We find that the probability of
submitting a proposal increases with prior climate-related experience (β1 = .094, SE = .029, t(887) =
3.29, p < .01) being male (β3 = .094, SE = .027, t(887) = 3.54, p < .01), and being from outside the
United States (β4 = -.057, SE = .026, t(887) = -2.18, p < .05). Education had no significant effect.
We also use the same variables to model the probability that a member was selected as a finalist,
conditional on having submitted a proposal. There are far fewer finalists (n = 54) than proposal
authors and several of these authors did not respond to all key questions of interest in the survey, so
none of the variables in this model are found to have a significant effect on the probability that a
proposal is selected as a finalist. However, we note that each of the regression coefficients is negative.
This suggests that contest entrants without previous climate-related experience, without graduate
school experience, who are women, and who are from outside of the United States are no less likely
(and perhaps more likely) to become finalists. Specifically, the regression estimates that the
probability of an author being selected as a finalist increases by 5.4% when the author is female (95%
confidence interval: -9% to +20%), by 5.0% when the author has no graduate school experience (95%
confidence interval: -8% to +18%), by 2.8% if the author has no previous climate-related experience
(95% confidence interval: -13% to +19%), and by 4.7% if the author is not from the United States (95%
confidence interval: -8% to +18).
4. CONCLUSION
The Climate CoLab is clearly succeeding in its goal of crowdsourcing the problem of what to do about
climate change insofar as it has attracted a large, global community that is already highly educated
and active with climate issues. Additionally, by encouraging broad participation from individuals not
previously involved in climate issues, those without postgraduate education, and those from outside
the U.S., the CoLab has fostered high levels of learning and attitude change. Finally, and perhaps
most importantly, we find suggestive evidence that these users—as well as women—are at least as
likely as others to submit high quality proposals. In other words, people who might otherwise be less
likely to be included in conversations about climate issues are at least as likely to make useful
contributions in this online community.
4 E.P. Duhaime, G.M. Olson and T.W. Malone
Collective Intelligence 2015
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... This can be accomplished by asking volunteers to classify or annotate the weather data. An approach to classify what can be done collectively about global climate change relies on the use of online surveys [21]. The target is a pool of individuals with or without graduate education, which can give ideas and suggestions to how humanity must react to the climate change. ...
... It is worth noting that the studies discussed earlier do not address the problem of weather annotation to help classify EWE. As an effort to solve this issue, online surveys have been proposed to collect suggestions on the impacts of global climate change [21]. Two studies reported the usage of mobile applications for collecting the contributions of volunteers on reporting real-time data [19,22]. ...
... With the generated maps, tasks can be created and the weather experts can collaborate on the identification of EWEs. The collaboration approach on weather problems is also followed by Duhaime, Olson and Malone [21], where the problem is broken down into small tasks while collecting and aggregating contributions from various participants using surveys. The eCSAAP-ACAEWE offers an alternative approach by presenting the weather events in an interactive way using weather maps. ...
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The harsh impacts of extreme weather events like cyclones or precipitation extremes are increasingly being felt with hazardous consequences. These extreme events are exceptions to well-known weather patterns and therefore are not forecasted with current automatic computational methods. In this context, the use of human computation to annotate extreme atmospheric phenomena could provide novel insights for computational forecasting algorithms and a step forward in climate change research by enabling the early detection of abnormal weather conditions. However, existing crowd computing solutions have technological limitations and show several gaps when involving expert crowds. This paper presents a research approach to fulfill some of the technological and knowledge gaps for expert crowds’ participation. A case study on expert annotation of extreme atmospheric phenomena is used as a baseline for an innovative architecture able to support expert crowdsourcing. The full stack service-oriented architecture ensures interoperability and provides an end-to-end approach able to fetch weather data from international databases, generating experts’ visualizations (weather maps), annotating data by expert crowds, and delivering annotated data for processing weather forecasts. An implementation of the architecture suggests that it can deliver an effective mechanism for expert crowd work while solving some of the identified issues with extant platforms. Therefore, we conclude that the proposed architecture has the potential to contribute as an effective annotation solution for extreme weather events.
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... Jeppesen and Lakhani (2010) found that the best ideas came both from people who are often socially marginalized, specifically women, and from people whose technical expertise was in a field different from the problem at hand (e.g., a chemist solving a biology problem) [6]. Relatedly, Duhaime, Olson, & Malone (2015) found that ideas submitted to MIT's Climate CoLab (www.climatecolab.org) -a website where anyone in the world can submit solutions to climate-related issues-were just as likely to come from women as from men, from residents of other countries as from the US, and from people without a graduate school education or experience with climate issues [7]. ...
... Relatedly, Duhaime, Olson, & Malone (2015) found that ideas submitted to MIT's Climate CoLab (www.climatecolab.org) -a website where anyone in the world can submit solutions to climate-related issues-were just as likely to come from women as from men, from residents of other countries as from the US, and from people without a graduate school education or experience with climate issues [7]. ...
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... Jeppesen and Lakhani (2010) found that the best ideas came both from people who are often socially marginalized, specifically women, and from people whose technical expertise was in a field different from the problem at hand (e.g., a chemist solving a biology problem) [6]. Relatedly, Duhaime, Olson, & Malone (2015) found that ideas submitted to MIT's Climate CoLab (www.climatecolab.org) -a website where anyone in the world can submit solutions to climate-related issues-were just as likely to come from women as from men, from residents of other countries as from the US, and from people without a graduate school education or experience with climate issues [7]. ...
... Relatedly, Duhaime, Olson, & Malone (2015) found that ideas submitted to MIT's Climate CoLab (www.climatecolab.org) -a website where anyone in the world can submit solutions to climate-related issues-were just as likely to come from women as from men, from residents of other countries as from the US, and from people without a graduate school education or experience with climate issues [7]. ...
... Furthermore, we do not know enough about the characteristics of the recruits who authored finalist proposals to draw meaningful conclusions about them, although it is noteworthy that all eight for whom we have survey data live outside the United States. Therefore, while we know from other research that 1) recursive incentive mechanisms are a useful tool for accessing people with novel information and alternative viewpoints [18], and 2) such people often submit innovative ideas to open innovation contests [6][7], we are unable to prove that this is why the proposals of Social Network Prize recruits were of high quality. ...
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... Jeppesen and Lakhani (2010) found that the best ideas came both from people who are often socially marginalized, specifically women, and from people whose technical expertise was in a field different from the problem at hand (e.g., a chemist solving a biology problem) [6]. Relatedly, Duhaime, Olson, & Malone (2015) found that ideas submitted to MIT's Climate CoLab (www.climatecolab.org) -a website where anyone in the world can submit solutions to climate-related issues-were just as likely to come from women as from men, from residents of other countries as from the US, and from people without a graduate school education or experience with climate issues [7]. ...
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View
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Full-text available
  • Feb 2012
Global climate change is one of the most challenging problems humanity has ever faced. Fortunately, a new way of solving large, complex problems has become possible in just the last decade or so. Examples like Wikipedia and Linux illustrate how the work of thousands of people can be combined in ways that would have been impossible only a few years ago. Inspired by systems like these, we developed the Climate CoLab—a global, on-line platform in which thousands of people around the world work together to create, analyze, and ultimately select detailed plans for what we humans can do about global climate change. The Climate CoLab has been operating since November 2009, and has an active community of thousands of users. In this article, we outline some of the challenges faced in developing the system, describe our current solutions to these problems, and report on our experiences.
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Communicating Climate Change Risks in a Skeptical World
Article
Full-text available
  • Oct 2011
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been extraordinarily successful in the task of knowledge synthesis and risk assessment. However, the strong scientific consensus on the detection, attribution, and risks of climate change stands in stark contrast to widespread confusion, complacency and denial among policymakers and the public. Risk communication is now a major bottleneck preventing science from playing an appropriate role in climate policy. Here I argue that the ability of the IPCC to fulfill its mission can be enhanced through better understanding of the mental models of the audiences it seeks to reach, then altering the presentation and communication of results accordingly. Few policymakers are trained in science, and public understanding of basic facts about climate change is poor. But the problem is deeper. Our mental models lead to persistent errors and biases in complex dynamic systems like the climate and economy. Where the consequences of our actions spill out across space and time, our mental models have narrow boundaries and focus on the short term. Where the dynamics of complex systems are conditioned by multiple feedbacks, time delays, accumulations and nonlinearities, we have difficulty recognizing and understanding feedback processes, underestimate time delays, and do not understand basic principles of accumulation or how nonlinearities can create regime shifts. These problems arise not only among laypeople but also among highly educated elites with significant training in science. They arise not only in complex systems like the climate but also in familiar contexts such as filling a bathtub. Therefore they cannot be remedied merely by providing more information about the climate, but require different modes of communication, including experiential learning environments such as interactive simulations.
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Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change
Article
Full-text available
  • Feb 2007
  • Innovations
Global climate change, caused by human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions, is perhaps the most pressing and important problem currently facing humanity. It is also unique by virtue of being a truly systemic problem of vast complexity: it affects every one of us, and is directly affected by every one of our actions. Like nothing else, the climate crisis calls upon us to engage in effective collective deci- sion making on a global scale. At the same time, the spectacular emergence of the Internet and associated information technology has created unprecedented opportunities for new kinds of interactions, via email, instant messaging, news groups, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like. As the well-known examples of Wikipedia and Linux illus- trate, it is now possible to combine the work of thousands of knowledgeable and interested individuals in ways that were completely impossible a few years ago. But these technologies have not yet been used to deal effectively with our glob- al problems. Our societal conversations about controversial topics like global cli- mate change are often strident and unproductive. And we have no clear way to converge on well-supported decisions concerning what actions, both grand- and ground-level, humanity should take to solve these problems. In this paper we argue that it is now possible to harness computer technology to facilitate "collective intelligence"—the synergistic and cumulative channeling of
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Risk Communication on Climate: Mental Models and Mass Balance
Article
Full-text available
  • Nov 2008
  • SCIENCE
Public confusion about the urgency of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions results from a basic misconception.
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Climate interactive: the C‐ROADS climate policy model
Article
  • Jul 2012
In 1992 the nations of the world created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to negotiate binding agreements to address the risks of climate change. Nearly every nation on Earth committed to limiting global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system,” [superscript 1] which is generally accepted to mean limiting the increase in mean global surface temperature to 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.[superscript 2] High hopes were dashed at the 2009 Copenhagen climateconference when face-to-face negotiations among heads of state collapsed. Instead, nations were encouraged to make voluntary pledges to reduce their emissions. Those pledges currently fall significantly short of what is needed (UNEP, 2010) while GHG emissions have risen to record levels despite the great recession that began in 2008.
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The Climate CoLab: Large scale model--based collaborative planning
  • Jan 2011
  • J Introne
  • R J Laubacher
  • G M Olson
  • T W Malone
Introne, J., Laubacher, R. J., Olson, G. M., & Malone, T. W. (2011). The Climate CoLab: Large scale model--based collaborative planning. Paper presented at the Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CST 2011), Philadelphia, PA.
Current emissions reductions proposals in the lead-up to Cop-15 are likely to be insufficient to stabilize atmospheric Co2 levels: Using C-Roads-a simple computer simulation of climate change-to support long-term climate policy development
  • Jan 2009
  • E R Sawin
  • A P Jones
  • T Fiddaman
  • L S Siegel
  • D W T Franck
  • A Barkman
  • T Cummings
  • F Peter
  • J Mcglade
  • R W Corell
Sawin, E. R., Jones, A. P., Fiddaman, T., Siegel, L. S., Franck, D. W. T., Barkman, A., Cummings, T., von Peter, F., McGlade, J., & Corell, R. W. (2009). Current emissions reductions proposals in the lead-up to Cop-15 are likely to be insufficient to stabilize atmospheric Co2 levels: Using C-Roads-a simple computer simulation of climate change-to support long-term climate policy development. In proceedings of the Climate Change-Global Risks, Challenges, and Decisions Conference, Copnehagen, Denmark.