Programming the Global Brain

New ways of combining networked humans and computers, such as collective intelligence and social computing, are important and likely to become truly transformative in domains such as education, industry, government, and arts. Systems that cover an enormous range of approaches, have been developed that look for individual task-focused geniuses. The global brain, therefore, calls for a radically more capable quality assurance oriented toward the particular kinds of errors that occur with human participants. Today's innovative collective intelligence systems embody a set of common design patterns, including collections, collaborations, and various kinds of group and individual decisions. providing easy-to-use solutions for the problems of finding and motivating human participants, rather than requiring each system developer to solve this problem individually, will greatly facilitate programming the global brain.