Preface

Social collective intelligence is an emerging area at the intersection of collective intelligence and social informatics, where social processes between humans are being leveraged and enhanced, by means of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to solve challenging problems using the contributions of human collectives. Rather than being a well-defined area, it presents itself—at least for the time being—as a mix of various methods and technologies, such as social media and social computing, human-based computation, social networks and complex systems theory, crowdsourcing, and many other areas which all somehow aim at developing or understanding collectively intelligent systems by combining advanced ICT with the powers of individual and collective human intelligence. Within this broader area, while novel applications—from mobile social networking services to socially augmented reality systems—are appearing (and disappearing) at an ever-increasing rate, the ability to engineer these systems to concrete design objectives remains, until now, essentially a “black art‿. Although research in the different areas involved has produced many significant contributions, we are still far from a principled approach for designing and operating these kinds of systems.