Page 138 - Trust in ICT 2017

2 Trust in ICT

– three concepts of technology, users and usage, and content as platforms as techno-cultural
constructs;
– ownership, governance, and business model as platforms as socio-economic structures.

Environments for crowdsourcing and collective intelligence
In theory, collective intelligence attempts to describe the phenomenon in which large, loosely organized
groups of individuals come together to solve problems in highly effective ways. With the new environment
of ICT connectivity, it is possible for individuals in separate locations, who may even be anonymous to each
other, to work together on the same idea. Together, the concepts are attempting to understand the "wisdom
of the crowd". The large network of people to solve problems can extend more broadly as an open innovation
which consists of shifting the innovation process from inside the organization to generate ideas with those
outside the organization. One of the benefits of collective intelligence is the diversity of ideas to be produced.
When an individual tackles a problem alone, he or she may approach it with certain biases. Collective
intelligence mitigates these biases by collecting a wide range of viewpoints and then aggregating them to
reduce the effects of individual bias. The famous tools for collective intelligence are Wikipedia as a free
encyclopaedia and Wiki as a collaborative website.

Crowdsourcing, the best-known example of technology-enabled collective intelligence, refers to the practice
of an organization with a large population to solve a problem. To produce better ideas, crowdsourcing is to
generate solutions, products and/or ideas that are superior in quality, quantity and effectiveness to those
generated by the closed problem-solving methods. The word "crowdsourcing" is a combination of the words
"crowd" and "outsourcing". Crowdsourcing is a process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a
crowd of people. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers. By definition,
crowdsourcing combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where
each contributor, acting on their own initiative, adds a small contribution that combines with those of others
to achieve a greater result. Crowdsourcing can involve division of labour for tedious tasks split to use crowd-
based outsourcing, but it can also apply to specific requests, such as crowdfunding, a broad-based
competition, and a general search for answers, solutions, or a missing person.

New trends of social media
• Smartphones or social networking services replacing your wallets or credit cards

Recently, by using smartphones and/or social networking services, several millions of users send money to
each other by just using their debit card information, free of charge. Meanwhile, the smartphone has also
rolled out new payment features. It allows users who save their credit card information to check out with a
lot of e-commerce applications across the network. As a result, many business players are battling it out in
the mobile payment system, which is known in financial technology as FinTech. The smartphone or social
networking services may eventually charge for their money transfer services, leverage customer purchasing
data to rival traditional credit cards like Visa and Mastercard.
• Shopping plugs into social media
New buttons labelled as "buy" appear on certain tweets and posts on the social networking services. They
allow users to make purchases with just a click which integrates e-commerce and social media. While happily
chatting with friends, browsing the latest trends, sharing photos and videos, etc., their payment details are
on file and purchases are a tap on the screen. Since most social networking services are real time, the short-
term deals are with fleeting trends. With time-sensitive offers, consumers may be inclined to act quickly and
make a deal. There are major benefits to advertisers. With the advent of "buy" buttons, concrete revenue
figures can be attached to specific social networking messages in a way that has not been possible until now.
• Increasing advertising and privacy problems

A number of niche social networking services are built specifically with the lack of privacy, the collections of
demographic and psychographic data, and the increasingly pervasive advertising. They allow users to
exchange fully anonymous posts with people who are not physically nearby. The social networking service
has promised to share advertisement revenues with users based on the popularity of their posts. New social

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