Five principles for designing a mass collaboration project: motivate participants, leverage heterogeneity, focus attention, enable surprise, and be ethical.
Now that you might be excited about the potential for mass collaboration to solve your scientific problem, I’d like to offer you some advice on how to actually do it. Although mass collaborations may be less familiar than the techniques described in earlier chapters, such as surveys and experiments, they are not inherently any more difficult. Because the technologies that you will be able to harness are developing rapidly, the most helpful advice that I can offer is expressed in terms of general principles, rather than step-by-step instructions. More specifically, there are five general principles that I think will help you design a mass collaboration project: motivate participants, leverage heterogeneity, focus attention, enable surprise, and be ethical.
