The purpose of our innovative Crowdsourcing Platform, called SCG Court, is to build software for the coming Gig Economy where talent seeks many projects with different organizations (for-profit companies, NGOs, Universities, etc.). Companies come to SCG Court to define playgrounds so that winning players in those playgrounds develop useful technology to help solve one of the organizations problems. Players can live anywhere in the world: all they need is a computer with an Internet connection. Players register with SCG Court and choose the playgrounds they want to compete in. Each playground has prize money that will be distributed to the best players if a certain level of performance is achieved. In addition, the players build up their reputation which gives them status in the SCG Court community. SCG Court is designed to create a trusted relationship between talent and organizations. SCG Court offers a simple interface to talent to access the needs of numerous organizations and organizations have a simple interface to access a large pool of talent. Talent is guaranteed that their work is fairly evaluated by their peers through the SCG Court system. Talent is assured that if they perform a gig well (compared to their peers) they will be paid well.
The Crowdsourcing Systems generated by the Crowdsourcing Platform are supported by four established areas: (1) Group organization. Warren Bennis in his book: Organizing Genius, The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, says: "you create an atmosphere of stress, creative stress, everyone competing to solve one problem." (2) Karl Popper's approach to scientific knowledge based on refutation (3) Serious Games, including the notions of social welfare (collaboration through selfish competition) and equilibria and (4) Logic, specifically quantifier logic games with two players Exists and ForAll (going back to 1898), Lorenzen's approach to dialogic games and logics with incomplete information, specifically Hintikka's and Sandu's independence-friendly logic known as IF logic.
Our Crowdsourcing Platform is a generator of crowdsourcing systems, each defined by a playground definition. A playground defines a virtual world for the participating players and is designed in such a way that the players innovate in and focus on a specific area of interest.
SCG Court let's the players unfold their creativity in an optimal way. It organizes the crowd by letting it work in parallel on solving the problem while keeping the communication between the players to a minimum. The communication is engaging the players in a scientific discourse to determine who has the better solution to the problem. Communication is also used to level the playing field by sharing the best solution approaches with the entire community (after the "patent period" has expired).
A second important application of SCG Court is in education: to educate the students in an area you define a playground where the students learn through play. This approach matches well with creating dialog components of online courses in STEM areas.
What are the problems that can be solved by SCG Court? They are of the form: Given a set of at least two claims, what is the subset of "good" claims and how can the good claims be sucessfully defended. Often one is interested in the defense algorithm. Good can mean,e.g, "true" or "optimal". SCG Court is about distinguishing good claims from bad claims where the definitions of good and bad are precisely given. For example, the two claims could be: (1) There is Global Warming and (2) There is no Global Warming. The playground definition contains the refutation protocols for these two claims. Many playgrounds contain a large number of claims and SCG Court will help determine which ones are good. There are playgrounds for finding efficient techniques to solve complex optimization problems, like protein folding (see EteRNA) and playgrounds to develop energy efficient solutions.
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