CSCW Smart ? Collective Intelligence and CSCW in Crisis Situations Organisers: Monika Büscher 1 , Rebecca Ellis 2 , Maria Angela Ferrario 3 , Gerd Kortuem 3 , Jon Whittle 3 1 Department of Sociology 2 Lancaster Environment Centre 3 Computing Department Lancaster University, UK {m.buscher, r.ellis, m.ferrario, g.kortuem, j.whittle}@lancaster.ac.uk Marén Schorch maren.schorch@uni-bielefeld.de Research Group ’Communicating Disasters’ Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies ZiF Bielefeld University, Germany maren.schorch@uni-bielefeld.de Andreas Zimmerman Fraunhofer FIT, Germany andreas.zimmermann@fit.fraunhofer.de Contact: m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk Abstract There are potentially rich synergies between socio‐technical innovation in collective intelligence and CSCW. Examples like Wikipedia, collaborative sense‐making in crisis situations (Vieweg et al 2007), participatory sensing projects (Haque) and alternative reality games such as ‘I love Bees’ (Gurzick 2011) illustrate that collaborative work can involve many distributed people and that the results can amount to ‘crowdsourced’ production of intelligence about complex problems (Zwass 2010). On the other hand, the concept can mask problematic tendencies – far from being emergent and self‐organising – some forms of collective intelligence may be the result of ‘totalitarian’ ‘puppetmastering’ (McGonigal 2006). Alternatively, sensitive orchestration of public informational practices may open up new, genuinely collaborative opportunities for public engagement. This workshop takes examples of collaborative work and collective intelligence in disasters and ‘creeping’ crises such as climate change to explore opportunities and challenges for socio‐technical innovation. Introduction (preliminary) Crisis situations engender intensive information flows and need for collaboration not only between official and non‐governmental emergency response agencies and the media, but also amongst members of the public. People affected by earthquakes, fires, floods, violence or slow motion disasters such as climate change or soil erosion, their colleagues, friends and relatives, and those who may have helpful knowledge increasingly use social media (Facebook, Twitter) to communicate and make sense of events, and to work together to respond to the situation. This one day workshop focuses on one particular phenomenon of social media use in crises: ‘collective intelligence’. Collective intelligence is an ambiguous and highly productive, but also potentially treacherous concept. On the one hand, the notion can highlight positive social innovation, including the collective, ‘crowdsourced’ production of intelligence about complex problems (Zwass 2010), new ‘means for knowing what we are doing as a group’ (Levy 1997, Malone & Klein 2007, Connected Environments), or new distributed problem‐solving capabilities that are ‘best understood as emergent and collective rather than orchestrated’ (Vieweg et al