In September 2019, Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design launched the second round of the Collective Intelligence Grants Programme in partnership with Wellcome Trust, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (formerly Cloudera Foundation), and Omidyar Network. Together we created a £500,000 fund for experiments that could generate actionable insight on how to advance collective intelligence to solve social problems.

We supported organisations around the world to deliver 15 new experiments in machine-crowd co-operation to address complex challenges. The experiments were ambitious and wide ranging, from using a serious game played by adults and children to diagnose neglected global diseases (and train an AI model to do the same), to testing whether a swarm of 100 robots could act as a decision-support system for human decision-making.

This event marked the launch of our new report which details findings and stories from across the 15 experiments. We met the teams behind some of the collective intelligence experiments to learn what new tools like machine learning enable them to do differently, and how their insights and methods can be applied more widely. We also discussed what this research means for the future of how we think and act collectively.

You can find out more about each of the grantees and their work here, as well as in our new report.