Ideagoras

The task we’ve been given this week is related to ideagoras. The term means modern day agoras usually hosted in the Internet and we’re speculating now the pros and cons of them and also try to find out some possible uses for them in matters near to us (more info about agora and ideagora).

There is a large number of challenges and competitions that utilize the ideagora approach. One example is Google’s challenge for creating a project of going to Mars with a camera and receiving the first video of a planetary flyby. It’s more like a challenge but I’ve heard that there were teams of people who were cooperating using ideagoras as an approach.

Some ideagoras in the web utilize quite high prizes for the people trying to solve the problem given (eg. www.innocentive.com). It’s a good stimulus for private individuals who can benefit from for example privately conducted research done previously. At the same time people can create their small companies and use challenges presented at the sites like the one mentioned before for their start-up, though it might be quite risky. Big companies that possess large numbers of competent people in their staff can assemble groups of specialists, who are familiar with the topic and who won’t need much time for background research: it can be a source of easy money.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk uses a different approach, where people who have tasks to solve post small challenges, valued in cents, not thousands of dollars. In this site the biggest reward when this article was being written was $46.50 (when at Innocentive it was $100000). Individuals are more likely to benefit from it financially. Although, it is likely that competition is much higher in this case and one’s started work might be declined and a solution presented by someone else is taken into consideration instead.

Ideagoras can also be used for false purposes: bit by bit one could for example get a complete thesis work done with barely working him/herself at all. That would count as plagiarism, but it would be nearly impossible to check for, since the material is produced by multiple persons and compiled from that.

In developing countries, for example Ukraine, one can find advertisements in metro cars about offers to do Bachelor’s thesis for money or tasks like that. In Kiev there are hundreds of sources of getting your thesis done with minimum effort. There it is legal and laws don’t prohibit that. Those companies/individuals that offer that sort of services can consider going to the site like we mentioned in this article and offer their services/ find tasks that they can complete received from all over the world. This is a business idea, although it goes in the gray area of ethics in science.

Another drawback is that whenever a person gives a result to the given problem in an ideagora, the result has to be checked thoroughly, since there is always the possibility, that someone is just trying to use the system to gain rewards with false results. There is also the possibility that someone could use some ideas that they’ve worked out for someone else to their own gain, possibly negating any benefit to original person posting the ideagora even if it was answered in a manner suitable for payment.

In overall, the idea of ideagoras is quite good and it has a lot of power, when it is utilized for the “right” purposes. It can benefit all the parties related to it, both the doer and the employer. It has it’s own drawbacks (answers might take some time, they might be inaccurate etc.) but it’s still worthwhile to keep the systems running.

In Ville’s opinion, ideagoras are used in some sense already in the IT field. For example programmers can search up answers to a specific problem they are encountering from the Internet. Although no money is related to these answers and questions, the systems usually work two-way: you have to post good answers in order to see some answers to your questions.

Our university could utilize the idea by offering the possibility for solving bigger problems to companies as a part of the students studies: thesis, project studies etc. This is already done in some degree, but involving more companies on a larger scale in Finland, or even Europe, might benefit the university, the student and the companies (more graduating students, easier to find thesis topics, problems getting solutions).