QLectives · Quality Collectives: Socially Intelligent Systems for Quality

Using a complexity perspective, QLectives will understand, experiment with, design and build cooperative socially intelligent ICT systems composed of self-organising peers, that will enable and support emergent 'quality collectives' to enhance, for instance, scientific innovation and decentralized media distribution.We shall bring together complex system scientists, social scientists and distributed systems engineers to produce new theories and algorithms. Our method will be that of empirical experimentation using living labs" involving thousands of people connected over the internet into collectives. The project will generate better theoretical understanding of complex techno-social systems, and how trust and reputation may emerge among a community and used to enhance quality. The work is organised into 4 synergistic streams: 1. Theoretical and algorithmic foundations, 2. Algorithm design, simulation and evaluation, 3. Empirical data-sets collection, processing and validation, 4. Platform and living lab implementation.As a basis we shall extend an already deployed, mature P2P technology platform and make use of two existing user communities: the econophysics forum and tribler.org. Our results will be applied to create two examples of how ICT moulds and becomes part of the systems to which it is applied: QScience - a peer-to-peer application for facilitating scientific innovation by supporting scientific communities, rating activities for quality to identify potential collaborators, hot spots and breakthroughs, and disseminating the right information to the right peers promptly