Picture a glass jar packed with jelly beans at a county fair. Then imagine that 500 fairgoers try to guess the number of jelly beans.
If you add up the guesses and divide by 500, the resulting average will be very close to the accurate jelly bean count - and likely much closer than any individual guess.
Behold the "wisdom of crowds."
Get ready for a revolution based on that concept: It's called "crowdsourcing." In fact, the revolution is under way.
Crowdsourcing means taking a problem, technical, creative, economic or informational, and seeking a solution from the vast, international public of the Internet. It's like opening a digital suggestion box to the entire globe.
This concept has already transformed the software industry. The collaborative, public writing of "open source" code - a seminal example of crowdsourcing - has produced such game-changers as the Linux operating system.
Now the concept is transforming science and product development.
The crowd can be pretty smart. Not always, though, cautions James Surowiecki, the New Yorker's superb economics writer and The Wisdom of Crowds author.
For a crowd to be wise, he says, it must be large enough and diverse in knowledge. It must work independently enough to avoid group-think.
Though the crowd can arrive at brilliance, it usually does so sloppily. Ninety percent of its ideas will be junk. But 10 percent will be dotted with gems, gems you never would have found if you'd consulted only your usual circle.
Here's another benefit: The crowd will happily sift the jetsam to find the good stuff for you. Think Netflix users' movie ratings. Or Zagat's, which crowdsourced restaurant reviews 25 years before the term was invented.
The guy who coined the term, Jeff Howe, has written the book on it. Crowdsourcing is an enthusiastic, but not uncritical, look at the trend.
Howe cites many places you've seen crowdsourcing. Wikipedia is a triumph of the practice. American Idol is a cultural phenomenon built on it: The crowd provides the talent, winnows it (often to Simon's exasperation), then makes its favorites stars.
Crowdsourcing can achieve far meatier tasks than deciding who warbled a Bee Gees medley best. Two examples:
Science: Darlene Cavalier is "The Science Cheerleader." On a blog devoted to citizen science (www.sciencecheerleader.com), this Philadelphia woman matches ordinary people with research projects in search of data or observations.
