# Mass Collaboration and Learning: Opportunities, Challenges, and Influential Factors
## 2 Base Concepts
* Both, mass collaboration and collective intelligence take place at group level. * Both benefit of diverse capacities, capabilities, and strategically useful information from the multiple participants. * In both, collaborative and intellectual endeavors occur. * In both, 'general individual intelligence' turns into 'general collective intelligence'. * In both, the control structure (if any) is decentralized. * In both, the location is universally distributed. * In both, the knowledge flow shifts from an individual to collective level. * In both, the relations are informal. Some major differences:
* The size of community in mass collaboration is, in all cases, large. However, in collective intelligence it could be small, medium, or big. * The collective intelligence communities are not exclusively human (they are also observed within many social animal species, or even communities of machines), but mass collaboration is (so far) solely for human communities. * The purpose of mass collaboration is solving complex problems, but for collective intelligence is solving diverse problems, or amplifying and improving outcomes. * Due to the size of community in mass collaboration, it predominantly occurs over the Internet, but in collective intelligence (particularly in small and medium size communities) online connection is not a must, and it may exist without use of ICT (except those cases that are online by nature). * Mass collaboration is basically mediated by content, but collective intelligence is mediated by social interaction. * Mass collaboration relies on collaboration and cooperation, but collective intelligence in addition to them might also motivate participants via healthy levels of competition. Given the above, it can be concluded that collective intelligence is not exactly as the same as mass collaboration, however the two concepts have a large overlap. In Figure 1, their relationship is illustrated. In addition, some application examples of mass collaboration are addressed in Table 3. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline
**Some Application Examples** & **References** \\ \hline Wikipedia & [8] \\ \hline Digg & [7] \\ \hline Yahoo! Answers & [7] \\ \hline SETI@home & [7] \\ \hline Scratch & [1] \\ \hline Galaxyzoo & [1] \\ \hline Foldit & [1] \\ \hline Applying Delphi method & [11] \\ \hline Climate Colab & [12] \\ \hline Assignment Zero & [13] \\ \hline DonationCoder & [13] \\ \hline Experts Exchange & [13] \\ \hline Waze & [14] \\ \hline Makerspaces & [1] \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Some application examples of mass collaboration. Taking into account the above-mentioned points, examples, and contributions from the literature the following definitions are suggested. Mass collaboration is a kind of collective effort that leads to complex problem solving when a large number of distributed autonomous participants work together or in parallel on a single project and share their sharable resources and commonalities. Solving such a problem is often considered unsolvable, and/or is beyond one's ability, that is why it needs the confluence of different contributions from a variety of backgrounds. This type of collaboration is typically mediated by the contents or objects being created (a kind of stigmergy) and occurs mostly over the Internet, using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools (but not always). Collective intelligence is a kind of wisdom and knowledge that emerge from the collaboration or competition of a small to large number of self-organized contributors, and it is used to solve a problem and/or fulfil a task. In principle, collective intelligence leads to mutual recognition and enrichment of contributors. It is mediated by direct social interaction and may exist without the use of ICT.