Sunday 8 July 2012

Home

[Complainants]   ...   [Allies]   ...   [Declaration] 

 We have borrowed the future from our children - what legacy will we leave them if we are not accurately informed to rationally choose a safe & sustainable way forward?


Open to a brighter future ?

What if  ......

the BBC covered
issues that concern you, accurately, 
impartially & with-
out misleading spin?

In that case you and "we" i.e. the other causes standing for self evident truths whitewashed by the BBC, would have a more just arena in which to state our case. If we can be "Together for the Charter", while diverse in opinion and commitment to our particular concern, we shall all benefit.

 This is not a call to create another campaign - nor to add another committee meeting to busy diaries. This is a call to sharpen our individual lobbies on parliament by uniting in common demands that offer the best opportunity for transforming the BBC into what it promises - a bastion of honest reporting and professional integrity where the "heart of decision making" lies in the hands of licence holders.

We know that broadcasting  is a powerful tool in shaping our perception of reality and that our British Broadcasting Corporation is a dominant and widely respected institution. From personal experience, many of you reading this will know that on crucial issues the BBC disseminates sophisticated disinformation which misdirect the trusting viewer on to diversionary byways.

Many listeners and viewers  discover that the complaints procedure, on key issues, is a Kafkaesque stonewall. The BBC is empowered by the Royal Charter but accountable only to itself unless Downing Street or Royalty are slighted.  It would appear that  BBC directors and the Trust are serving their private agendas rather than licence payers' rights.

The Charter responsibilities have been ignored by the BBC. The political committee responsible for Parliamentary oversight is composed of time-serving  "yes men" who will not "rock the boat". 


This site addresses one issue only: to make the BBC truly accountable to the Charter. It stands only for the statements made on this page and the [Declaration] backed by relevant reference. Individual causes are not championed, only the BBC Charter and the quest for new independent stewardship.

Together for the Charter links to known expressions of complaint about the BBC's biased and distorted portrayal of crucial issues. [Complainants] SEE RH column >

Together for the Charter seeks to join with complainants in presenting a roll call of organisations and key individuals jointly demanding that Parliament, through the BBC, launches a quest seeking the wisdom of the BBC's audience on how to create an equitable, decentralised system -  with real power - to give direction and to hold the BBC accountable to the Royal Charter.  [Allies]  SEE RH column >

Diverse parties dedicated to making the BBC comply with the Charter must have an influential role in public consultation programmes on transforming the Corporation. The BBC sought similar answers in its 2007  "Audience Engagement Protocol" consultation but by setting the agenda and the questions, it could steer the research in its desired direction. Nevertheless, valuable insights were gleaned from this process. [More]

 It falls to those who are aware of the power of corrupt media to shape history,  to point to a way that offers the best opportunity of maintaining a British broadcasting service that is accountable to public forces independent of government and monarchy. 

 To be most effective we must work together for the Charter through common demands for effective stewardship that might best represent the diversity of opinion in multi-cultural British society. When those demands come from the licence holders "at the heart of decision-making in the future" (quoting the BBC Trust's 2007 "Audience Engagement" document ) we shall be in a stronger position from which to argue our case. 

Editors Note: 

This initiative is to express my dissent regarding the flagrant violation of Charter obligations and to seek to work in parallel with others so inclined. It promotes the notion of "collective intelligence" and is itself a product of many minds.

 I have to trust in the innate protective skills of our species to recognise the dangers to the majority without accurate knowledge of our world and ourselves. The BBC is a pivotal educator and evidence shows it is not reporting the truth about many aspects of our world.

 I hope the roll call of witnesses aligned here, attesting to this uncomfortable truth about the BBC, will encourage readers to explore the brief outline of the Wisdom of Crowds and the Charter Declarations encompassing those ideas.

 The uncomfortable truth being that the"people's broadcasting institution" - which is supposed to protect the people from political abuse - is in fact a major part of that abuse.

 When the pathfinders for truth and justice find common ground we shall have real opportunity of reaching the tipping point when large numbers of the public demand a transformation in the structures of power that currently dominate the BBC.

 John Yates
Posted by at No comments:

Friday 6 July 2012

Collective Intelligence / Wisdom of crowds


Terms such as collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds have diverse meanings. For example the judging of the weight of an ox, where by the average of the  aggregated guesses of a crowd can provide an accurate answer,  to Linux where by one individual's brilliance in a crowd focused on one broad issue can result in solutions as good as, if not better, than those conceived of by specialist teams or experts. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Collective Intelligence, hosts a information resource on the subject which offers a starting point to the subject.

Another point to consider is the difference that some attribute to collective intelligence, collective wisdom and collective consciousness.

Extract:

Collective Intelligence refers to the external, methodological and operational aspects of social organisations? to raise their intelligence as a whole. See below.

Collective Wisdom is the access to and the manifestation of wisdom, at a collective level. A group of wise individuals doesn't necessarily know how to behave wisely together, because of a lack of collective intelligence. Therefore, collective intelligence is a necessary (but not exclusive) condition for collective wisdom to emerge.

Collective Consciousness is the sense that each participants has of the consciousness of the group. It is a space he/she can access at anytime to sense what the context is and what is willing to emerge. Three key conditions are necessary for collective consciousness to manifest: a shared wealth (the perception of qualities and contributions of each one), a shared vulnerability (the humanness in the other), a shared language (for understanding each other).


From the The Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Examples of collective intelligence
http://scripts.mit.edu/~cci/HCI/index.php?title=Examples_of_collective_intelligence
  1. ArmchairGM [1] is a promising extension of wiki with explicit user evaluation.
  2. Assignment Zero [2] We're covering a story: How the Web makes it possible for the crowd to be the source of good ideas. But instead of one journalist reporting, we've created a site where many people can work on the story, with editors as guides.
  3. BSD [3] project started in 1970s, became freely distributable in 1991. However, a lawsuit and an injunction from AT&T put its legal status in question until 1994 and reduced its impact on open-source development.
  4. Cairns [4] is graphical groupware designed to help those working collaboratively to evaluate and compare their own experiences and to search and learn from the experience of others. Cairns can help you to evaluate, design and manage your group project.
  5. Citizendium [5] is intended to avoid the errors, vandalism, and lack of accountability of Wikipedia. Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy. See article in "USA Today" [http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/2007-03-25-wikipedia-alternative_N.htm>.
  6. CVS [6] project created by Dick Grune in 1986 provided an important tool to aid collaborative software development: several people could edit the same set of files and commit versions independently. CVS keeps track of all changes and can revert unhelpful changes when needed. These features made CVS an important tool of open-source software development.
  7. Del.icio.us [7] is a web service that helps people organize, annotate, and share their bookmarks. It was created in late 2003, and mostly notable for its well developed social tagging system and, recently, tools for building content-centered social network. Users can subscribe to tags of other users, add people to their network, who tags pages of interest to them. The site uses the number of people who bookmarked a certain page as a measure of popularity and features the most popular pages to make even more people aware of them.
  8. Digg [8] is a news discovery service that integrates submissions and evaluations of many people to discover the most interesting news stories. Interestingness is measured by the frequency estimate of positive user feedback (diggs) that story received shortly after submission. The service was launched in 2004 in the US and received probably the most attention among services of this kind.
  9. Dmoz [9] (initially gnuhoo) was launched in June 1998 as a web directory edited by volunteers rather than employees. The initial name was misleading in its gnu- part, because the similarity to GNU went only half-way: the project invited contributions of volunteers like in GNU, but, unlike GNU, the end results, both software and content, were proprietory to the company that provided the platform for collaboration. However, Dmoz might be the first in the long line of commercial web2.0 projects that derive their profit from contributions of volunteers and don't give their contributors a free license to use the created content.
  10. Donationcoder [10] is a donationware development website based on the concept of user innovation and crowdsourcing launched in March 2005. Users suggest what kind of software they would like to see implemented and how much they would be willing to donate to developers who decide to implement this functionality. This helps to identify the most useful projects, i.e. in which many users are interested. At some point, the total donation amount from all interested users may become sufficient to implement the software. This micro-finance practice was mostly limited to small projects. The idea was quickly adopted by others, for example, "cambrianhouse.com" [http://cambrianhouse.com>
  11. Experts Exchange [11] was one of the first knowledge markets on the web, structured as a Q&A service that allows any web user to answer questions. It was created in 1996 by Dan Gardner. The system provides a virtual currency to its participants to regulate the number and complexity of the questions asked and evaluate answers received. The asker of the question allocates a certain amount of points to the question. The question is published on the network and other participants can submit an answer. The asker then accepts or rejects the answer. On acceptance, the process is finished and the question is removed, otherwise it remains published to collect more answers. This project inspired many similar sites, among them Google Answers is probably the most notable.
  12. Foresight Exchange [12] is the first online prediction market, a market in which people invest for and against claims about future events. It was created in 1994 based on Robin Hanson's Idea Futures concept (1990).
  13. Free Knowledge Exchange [13] project is a knowledge market that combines intelligent abilities of many people to identify and solve their problems using evolutionary computation. The goal is to create an open community and a kind of collective intelligence that effectively helps every participant to be more successful in solving everyday problems. It was launched as a research project in May 1998 in Russia and may be the first online project to specifically explore collective intelligence by outsourcing intelligent operations to a large number of people (essentially what was later called "crowdsourcing"). The mechanism of this service was published in 2000-2002 in several research papers. Since then, the elements of this service were adopted by others. The most notable similar service is "Yahoo! Answers" [http://answers.yahoo.com>, launched by Yahoo! in December 2005 and currently the biggest service of this kind by the number of users.
  14. Global Public Health Information Network [14] - Combines computer-based search, translation and filtering software with human investigation committee to identify early warning signs of new epidemics and public health crises.
  15. GNU [15] project was started by Richard Stallman in 1984 with the goal to make software freely available to people. Free software allows many people to collaborate in software development: learn, reuse, modify, recombine, and adapt software to their needs. It enables open user innovation. But in order to achieve this goal, two major difficulties had to be dealt with: technical and legal. A free software development environment was necessary to produce free software. A major legal innovation was needed to provide a legal basis for such an activity. GNU project provided free tools to developers as well as created several content licensing mechanisms providing a basis for collaborative creation of software and other works of authorship.
  16. Google [16] is a web search engine that evaluates web content based on aggregated implicit human evaluations contained in web references. It was created in September 1997 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The evaluation Google produces is known as the Google PageRank. It is based on the Markov chain model. The PageRank is essentially the share of the time that a web user will spend on the page by randomly following web references for a sufficiently long time.
  17. Innocentive [17] is a knowledge market established in 2001. It accepts R&D problems in chemistry and biology from the companies ("Seekers") and allows people ("Solvers") to contribute their solutions. After the deadline, the Seekers select the best solution and rewards it with a cash award, in a similar way as in Experts Exchange.
  18. Intermix [18] project created by Roger Eaton in 1988 introduced the idea of collective communication where people can write messages on any topic of concern and then rate each other's messages for interest and agreement, so messages important for community are identified and can be acted upon. A group can maintain a dialog with its leaders using these collective messages. It can seek advice from an individual outside the group, try to influence someone, direct the activities of volunteers or hired agents.
  19. IRC [19] project created by Jaarko Oikarinen in 1988 implemented distributed instant messaging medium. The messages are classified into channels that are analogous to USENET groups. However, a new channel can be created instantly for any topic unlike in USENET. Being real-time synchronous conversation tool, IRC offers most of the advantages of live conversation. It supports real-time dialogs, group discussions, question-answer and brainstorming sessions.
  20. Kiva.org > "" [http://www.kiva.org provides microfinancing to entrepreneurs in the under-developed/developing world by connecting them to lenders from the communities in the rest of the world, basically you and I. An agent or partner qualifies these applicants, then upload their loan application to Kiva.org's website, and anyone in the rest of the world may participate by selecting applicants to lend money to. An agent in Africa uses the collective intelligence of the village to qualify an applicant, by holding a town hall style meeting, where the people who know the applicant best provide input to the agent on whether the borrower will be good at the business and whether the applicant is a good business risk.
  21. Knowledge-iN [20] is a knowledge market service by Naver combined with a search engine. The Knowedge-iN service was launched in October 2002 in Korea, helping Naver to become a top web portal in Korea. The main difference from Free Knowledge Exchange seems to be the combination of Knowledge-iN with a search engine and a social network.
  22. Lima refinery improvement story - Example of integrating Interpersonal and Distributed forms of CI
  23. Linux [21] project was started by Linus Torvalds in 1991 to create a free operating system uninhibited by legal issues and produced it before the lawsuit about BSD was settled. As a result, GNU/Linux and not BSD became the major force behind the open-source movement. Linux development fully explored advantages of open innovation in software development and inspired many later projects.
  24. Mechanical Turk [22] is an Amazon.com-developed web site where people can advertise and perform "HITs" (human intelligence tasks) that are difficult for computers, but easy for humans (e.g. determining if there is a pizza parlor in a photograph). People get paid for performing HITs.
  25. OASIS [23] - a leading Open Standards development organization, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. The consortium produces more Web services standards than any other organization along with standards for security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries.
  26. Protégé [24] is an open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework developed (since 1985) by Stanford Medical informatics at the Stanford School of Medicine
  27. Slashdot [25] comment moderation and meta-moderation system powered by its readers (1999). "Imagine this would work like each comment would have some sort of score. Comments could be given points or have points removed based on how many people vote somehow." ("source" [http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/09/17/175022>). "Think of a news site like Slashdot without a guy like me, or a group of guys at the center. One where the best comments become the articles on the homepage." ("source" [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/03/23/1058204>).
  28. SourceForge [26] - the leading open source software community environment and repository
  29. StumbleUpon [27] is a web discovery service that integrates submissions and evaluations of many people to help them to discover quality content: news, photos, multimedia. Unlike most of the prior work in collaborative filtering using content relevance, StumbleUpon uses a more balanced approach combining peer endorsement with conceptual relevance. It also uses evolutionary computation to better match content to the interests of its users. This project was launched in February 2002 in Canada.
  30. Systems that get predictions from many to select the few who are good predictors ("PicksPal and Marketocracy" [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/18/AR2006101801883.html?referrer=emailarticle>)
  31. The "Ontolog" [28] Community of Practice - is an open, international, virtual community of practice devoted to advancing the field of ontological engineering and semantic technologies. Established in 2002, Ontolog (a.k.a. Ontolog Forum) advocates the adoption of ontologies (and ontological engineering methodologies) into mainstream applications and international standards.
  32. The AC/UNU "Millennium Project" [29] - is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project commenced its work in 1992, and is currently managing a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its 28 geographically dispersed nodes and hundreds of participant to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and other special studies and reports.
  33. TWiki [30] is an open source wiki software targeted at enterprise collaboration. The project was started in July 1998 by Peter Thoeny. It is notable for introducing RCS-based revision control to wiki in October 1998. Revisiion control turned out very important addition to wiki, as it provided for selection among different revision and easy elimination of unhelpful edits. TWiki also introduced the concept of structured wikis.
  34. USENET (USEr NETwork) was created in 1979 by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. USENET is a distributed message repository and communication medium, where messages are tagged by their authors using the names of the existing newsgroups. Being a precursor of the modern tagging system, USENET has extra advantage of being distributed, however creating a new tag/newsgroup is not as easy as in modern tagging systems.
  35. Wikinancial [31] is a website that allows an online community of users to share their stock picks for free. The goal of the site is to let investors backtest their strategies, and quotes are taken from Yahoo! Finance. Wikinancial ranks both members’ portfolios and stocks by their performance.
  36. Wikipedia [32] is a project creating a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit as a wiki. It was launched on January 15, 2001 using "UseModWiki" [33] software that was augmented with revision control and concurrent editing capability (between "December 9, 2000" [34] and "February 1, 2001" [http://web.archive.org/web/20010201193600/http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl>). It is not clear if these features were requested by founders of Wikipedia or their appearance was a lucky coincidence, but they turn out to be crucial to the success of Wikipedia. Apart from this, Wikipedia project introduced many novel features into wiki technology, among them: embedded images (January 2002), social tagging and parameterized templates (August 2004), permalinks (October 2005), undo revison feature (January 2007). Wikipedia releases its content under GNU Free Document License (GFDL), that was drafted just one year before Wikipedia launch.
  37. WikiWikiWeb [35] is a web site allowing everyone to edit its pages. It was created in March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as a tool to collaboratively develop and maintain Portland Pattern Repository. Wiki is a simple idea that turned out very useful and influential. Being open-source both in its concept and implementation, it motivated many people to experiment with the software and contribute to the development of wiki technology.
  38. Windparken [36] is being used in the Netherlands to plan wind turbines. The wiki, extended with a Google Maps plugin, presents maps with proposed wind turbine locations. The goal is to decide on locations for 6000 3-MegaWatt turbines, enough to provide for all electricity in the Netherlands.
  39. Yahoo! Answers >, launched by Yahoo! in December 2005, is mainly notable due to its popularity and successful deployment worldwide. Yahoo! Answers was built as an English analog of the Korean "Knowledge-iN" [http://kin.naver.com project by Naver and very similar to it in many aspects, except for the name and language. Despite the lack of technological innovation, this is one of the recent successes of Yahoo, very well executed and received the most attention recently among this kind of services. It might be now the second most useful reference resource after the Wikipedia and well integrated into Yahoo! search.
  40. ChallengePost, http://www.challengepost.com, a Web-based clearinghouse for running contests like the Netflix Prize. For details, see this Wired.com article from 9/8/09: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/challengepost-a-public-clearinghouse-for-netflix-prize-like-contests.



Posted by at No comments:

The Wisdom of Crowds:


Collective Intelligence - Sharing Imagination & Knowledge
A reference resource for the many and varied methods of tapping and using the intellectual wealth and wisdom of many individuals, a work in progress. Suggestions from the crowd welcomed 29.08.12


 This term  was brought into popular usage by staff writer on the New Yorker, James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds  "Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations", published by Doubleday 2004.
The book relates to diverse collections of independently deciding individuals who, under the right conditions, offer solutions more accurate and ingenious than those of experts or hierarchies.

 This approach captures diverse individual sparks of brilliance and nurtures an organised collective intelligence as opposed to crowd psychology as traditionally understood in riots and stock exchange bubbles. [1]

The much quoted experiment in collective intelligence by Francis Galton, on a crowd accurately judging the weight of an ox, has reportedly been replicated in the 20th Century with different tasks and in various ways, with good success. [2] 

Surowiecki quotes many other ways the wisdom of crowds has been used and makes the point that there needs to be both a clear direction of the process and a mechanism for interpreting collective judgments and individual solutions. He makes controversial statements and has been challenged on questions of mean or median but the potential for collective intelligence is more that judging the weight of an ox or the number of jelly beans in a jar. [3]

The book refreshes old ideas in modern settings and opens up the possibilities for an entirely different  approach to exploring issues of fundamental importance to any notion of "accountability" for our public broadcasting service.

There are many facets to the "wisdom of crowds", from the original Athenian Greek city democracy, where only a minority had voting rights, which were participatory responsibilities, through to the Linux computer operating system, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" the modern airline protocol of "Cockpit Resource Management", "brainstorming" exercises and "crowd sourcing" models. [4]

The British jury system is one example of the trust we put in random selection from a defined group - jury service by being a registered elector.

Google functions so well because, at present, the system relies on the wisdom of millions of web site owners who link to pages of their choice. Their favourites allow Google to target the most relevant response to searches.

Linux, the open source operating system, is constantly updated by thousands of individual supporters. Their individual efforts are scrutinised by a core team that includes Linus Torvalds, who created Linux. A selection of the aggregated wisdom of autonomous programers constantly updates and de-bugs the system that challenges Microsoft, the world leader. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" says open source guru Eric Raymond.

In May 1968, the U.S. submarine Scorpion disappeared on its way back to Virginia after a tour of duty in the North Atlantic. It was lost in an area so big it was considered impossible to locate the vessel.

However, as Sherry Sontag and Chris Drew recount in their book "Blind Man"s Bluff", a naval officer named John Craven devised an form of collective intelligence to create a composite picture and used this together with an intriguing formula called Bayes’s theorem to estimate the Scorpion’s final location. Five months after the Scorpion disappeared, a navy ship found the Scorpion. It was 220 yards from where Craven’s group had said it would be. [5]

Will Hutton has argued that Surowiecki's analysis applies to value judgments as well as factual issues, with crowd decisions that "emerge of our own aggregated free will [being] astonishingly... decent".

He concludes that "There's no better case for pluralism, diversity and democracy, along with a genuinely independent press." [He could have added TV]
Guidelines

Surowiecki considers four criteria essential for maximising the potential of collective intelligence:

Diversity of opinion
Each person will have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.

Independence
People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Decentralization
People are autonomous of central control and are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.

Aggregation
Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

BBC license holders belong to our multi-class multi-cultural multi-ethnic society.

 In the quest for a genuinely representative accountability and control of the BBC, ingenuity and innovation is required in how groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behaviour or directly enforcing their compliance.

 This kind of autonomous cooperation, is one of the important elements in Surowieki's thesis. In pursuit of this end the ancient Athenians employed the practice of casting lots and rotation to get the best from the "crowd" whilst seeking to ensure no sectional interest dominated. 

The BBC itself acknowledges the centrality of the relationship between the Corporation and the public and runs audience engagement programmes. These are promised to be routes to "make sure [audiences] are at the heart of decision-making in the future". [6]

However, those who set the questions or select comments and ideas can do so to further their own agenda, even if done unconsciously. Nevertheless responses to one survey, asking open ended opinion questions, returned the aggregated comments: "be clear and transparent" and "not just one way" as principles for audience engagement.

One of the fundamentals of meaningfully tapping the wealth of insight of the many is that the process must not be just one way  regarding the power of setting the agenda, framing the questions, selecting and measuring the results. Consultation without those consulted having power is virtually meaningless.

The original Greek City states, where democracy evolved, had every citizen earn the right both to debate and vote. With that right  the duty of service in the defence of the city state, and as a representative and administrator for the city government, was accepted. See C.L.R James "Every Cook Can Govern" [7]

Major decisions were taken by direct democracy, participatory and deliberative. The public will was administered by citizens called to duty by complex systems of drawing lots. Rotation of powerful positions was strictly regulated with transparency, accountability and recall central to the systems.  "The essence of the Greek method, here as elsewhere, was the refusal to hand over these things to experts, but to trust to the intelligence and sense of justice of the population at large, which meant of course a majority of the common people." C.L.R. James. 

This is the form of government under which, many argue, flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known. 

It was a brief experiment with genuine democracy developed between 600 and 322 BC. The are many interpretations of the period but the outline is generally agreed. [8]

References:

[1]
Terms such as collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds have diverse meanings. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosts a information resource, the Center for Collective Intelligence which offers a starting point to the subject.
Negative aspects of crowds:

[2]
Francis Galton, ox experiment: 
Summary of Dutch attempt to replicate result:

[3]
Excerpts from Wisdom of Crowds, Chapter One.  Jelly bean experiment and more.

[8]

[9] 
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).[1]
The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts, draws many parallels with statistical sampling, but there is little overt discussion of statistics in the book.
Its title is an allusion to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841




Posted by at No comments:

Charter Declaration


.
We are diverse parties in our individual conflicts with the BBC. We are unified by this, our joint declaration:

1.   Within our sphere of knowledge,  the BBC has committed the most serious breaches of the Royal Charter, the Editorial Guidelines and its oft repeated pledges to report world events with integrity.

We charge the Corporation with betrayal of the British people and global audiences by broadcasting sophisticated specious disinformation, biased representation of key issues and events, as well as outright falsehoods.

We believe we have a legitimate expectation that the Corporation, the management, and government appointees, be held accountable to the Royal Charter and related legal obligations.


2. We note, the Corporation is tasked by the Home Office to "make sure [audiences] are at the heart of decision-making in the future".  We champion that declaration knowing it can only be held true if the control of the Corporation is wrested from vested interest and overseen  by forces independent of the BBC and government.

The existing top down pyramid structure must be replaced by a diverse confederation aiming broadly to represent the knowledge, opinion and interests of our multi faceted society.

Finding new stewardship structures that are flexible and free of unaccountable influence is the key issue in ensuring the Corporation meets its public duties as laid out in the Charter and Agreements. New thinking is required if citizens are to be trusted to "better" unaccountable power and be "at the heart of decision-making in the future".

The BBC itself is the ideal resource to explore "new thinking" by tapping the wealth of creativity and knowledge that resides in the BBC's audience - the wisdom of crowds. Overwhelming public pressure has to be applied to impel Parliament to direct the BBC to launch a nationwide inquiry into its governance - overseen by independent hands.


Let the People Speak
Outlining a nationwide inquiry: a basis for independent but unified demands on Parliament as a start towards meaningful transformation of the BBC.


To balance the serious complaints, which demonstrate deliberate BBC disinformation and bias, as well as to initiate the quest for a new system of governance, a series of independent documentaries for broadcast at peak viewing times on the BBC needs to be commissioned. This process must be controlled by "independent hands".

Each in the series of documentaries has to be followed by country wide audience engagement programmes as "Audience Commissions" publicly to confront the BBC on the facts and emphasis of their reporting as well as to advise on transforming the control structure in light of audience deliberations on evidence presented.

These "Audience Commissions" should have power to call further hearings, to commission research and invite witnesses to give testimony.

But the first step can be a "Commission of Complainants" drawn from those allied to this declaration or prominent in challenging BBC hegemony.  This "Commission" would consist of  stalwart complainers, critical academics, expert dissidents and groups dedicated to particular causes - all as posted here.

The Commission of Complainants will be needed to direct and oversee the timeline and variety of "dissident documentaries" and to shape the structure and content of audience participation programmes, i.e. BBC programmes set-up as "audience commissions", tasked publicly to uncover the truth about Charter abuse and charges of bias and disinformation.

The findings of these "Audience Commissions", steered and assessed by a Commission of Complainants, should be widely broadcast to set the next stage for transforming the Corporation into what it promises to be: a bastion of honest and professional investigation and reporting, where the heart of decision making lies in the hands of the audience.

Like Greek "city democracy" the way to select these "independent hands" fairly is by lottery to choose a random selection from the pool of candidates. Again like the Greeks, annual rotation is essential.

If the audience participation exercises are adroitly designed and executed we shall have the potential to discover, or rediscover, processes whereby the will, wisdom and profound knowledge of many individuals is applied meaningfully for the benefit of all.

If genuinely produced, promoted and screened at peak times, these programmes will attract millions to see BBC management openly challenged by the public - and to hear what listeners and viewers think are appropriate external and independent mechanisms to ensure the Corporation respects the Royal Charter and places audiences "are at the heart of decision-making in the future". [1]


If this seems all too much to ask, consider the alternative of doing what we have always done before - to get what we have always got before - fobbed off



----------------------------------
0000000000000000000
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)