Crowds

Ross Breadmore November 2011

This slide deck was created to precede a panel session on crowd behaviour, and as such only took five minutes to present.

The following may, or may not, make sense.

To examine crowds, I started with kittens. Where else?

Behind the kitten hide some big crowd numbers, such as 3,948,381* views… *a rough estimate

…and 2,178 edits, by over 1,000 individuals.

These numbers are amazing, and show real crowd behaviour, but crowds online have a real world impact, including pollution.

Server farms accounted for 14% of global MtCO2e emissions in 2007, expected to be 18% by 2020 Source: SMART 2020: enabling the low carbon economy in the information age

DATA CENTRE

Elsewhere, platforms like Facebook house enormous crowds…

…and sites like FixMyStreet show how such crowds can be harnessed for good…

…but sometimes the crowd opportunity is wasted

“If instead of pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads, what if they pointed it at great unsolved problems in science, how would the world be different today?”

Jeff Hammerbacher, former Facebook research scientist

Some are learning to harness digital crowds for good…

…BUT WHAT IF MORE DID?

This is where I finished, and sat down.

Thank you! @rossbreadmore nixonmcinnes.co.uk