IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 32

SPECIAL SECTION INTRODUCTION

JEREMY PITT

ADA
DIACONESCU

DAVID BOLLIER

Technology for Collective Action

T

he Digital Society is increasingly characterized by an ecosystem of smart, sociotechnical applications, such as smart grids,
smart homes, smart cars, and so on. These
applications are embedded in a social context with
people "in the loop." They are fully networked and
saturated with sensors, and they use artificial intelligence for context-awareness and adaptivity. Unlike
biological ecosystems, each application, and indeed
the ecosystem itself, is critically dependent on humancentred, mutually agreed upon, conventional rules or
norms for its effective and efficient operation.
Therefore, developing socio-technical (eco) systems raises three major engineering challenges, but
offers important new opportunities for successful collective action. The first challenge consists in modeling, understanding, and developing the interrelated
processes behind the formation, selection, and adaptation of the systemic rules, since these are essential for
ensuring desirable macro-level outcomes and avoiding detrimental ones. This may include for instance
the definition of efficient and commonly-acceptable
rules for maintaining and sustaining the (eco)system
over long periods of time.
The second challenge lies in identifying and capitalizing upon the key technology-enabled processes
that can motivate or even make possible new forms
of collective action. An important opportunity here
may come from understanding and exploiting the
role that well-managed (big) data and data-flows

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2345151
Date of publication: 17 September 2014

32

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can have in enhancing societal awareness and
responsiveness. Another opportunity may stem from
enriching the ecosystem with generative application
platforms that can encourage and promote social
incentives for orchestrated, synchronized or coordinated collective action.
finally, the third challenge is to persistently identify and address, via new sets of rules, the novel societal questions that the progressive introduction of
technology raises into the ecosystem. for instance, the
technology-enabled generation of massive amounts of
data may require specific rules for ensuring that data
generators are also its beneficiaries. Certainly, the
most important difficulty consists in understanding
how these interrelated challenges can be addressed
concurrently, within a highly dynamic context, so as
to provide rich opportunities for collective action and
increase the chances for coherent beneficial outcomes.
Collective action generally involves a group of
people working together to achieve some shared
objective. A frequent problem that can hinder collective action stems from the fact that group members
may also have individual interests, which may be in
conflict with the group's shared objective. furthermore, while the benefits of an action performed for
the common good might be shared equally among the
group members, the costs of the action fall only upon
the individual performing it. These asymmetries can
lead to many forms of anti-social behavior, such as
free riding, and to other undesirable consequences.
In traditional social systems, there is a "standard"
mechanism to address such problems of collective
action - institutions. Indeed, there is a well-established
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