Few science policy issues today are as complex or divisive as climate change. For that very reason a team of researchers is using the topic as part of a project that seeks to better understand and solve challenging society-level problems by leveraging the collective intelligence of Internet users worldwide.
The Climate CoLab project, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (M.I.T.) Collective Intelligence Lab, uses an online forum to encourage institutional and citizen scientists alike to develop proposals for addressing climate change and then improve those proposals based on Web community feedback. The proposals—broken down into “global” and “local” categories—are then judged as part of a multi-phase global competition where the winners are invited to present their ideas to public officials.
This year’s competition asks the question: “How should the global economy evolve through 2100, given the risks of climate change?” The competition is in its second phase, during which teams and individuals writing proposals seek to improve upon their original ideas with help from the more than 2,100 members of Colab’s online community. After the second phase wraps up on October 31 a team of judges will choose the most practical proposals to move on to the third and final round.
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