BiPSA: What Does the Group Say?

What Does Your Group Say?
When a group has a vexing issue to decide on -

a family matter

a business decision

a team's dilemma

a crisis response crew

The members express their opinion, vote the issue up or down, and the votes are counted to find out what the group as a whole thinks about the situation.

Question: Do We really want to simply count the 'yea' and 'nay' to find out what the group thinks?

What if Alice has a greater stake in the outcome of this issue? Should her vote count as much as Bob's who is less affected?

What if Carla is more knowledgeable than David, on this subject -- should their votes count the same?

What if Eve has no doubts about her opinion, but Fred is hesitant about his -- should Eve and Fred have the same impact on the group's opinion?

The more we account for those realities, the more credible, meaningful, and useful, will the integrated opinion be.

The 2004 publication of the landmark book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki has stimulated the development of many innovative devices to extract and exploit the integrated opinion of independent thinkers who belong to a certain group. As Surowiecki has shown, the wisdom of the group as a whole, for the long run, is superior to the individual opinion of any member of the group -- including its leader!

BiPSA contributes to this trend. Originally developed by Gideon Samid in his PhD dissertation at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, BiPSA stepped back into the mathematical foundation of opinion calculus. It emerged with a computational paradigm carefully crafted to account for all the available information to be integrated -- but it is equally mindful of the folly of overdoing the same. You can read more about BiPSA in our Patent Recrod, or you can test drive the various BiPSA WEB posting. Otherwise simply talk to us to find out how we can help you benefit from group and community wisdom.

Return to BiPSA: Group Decision Facilitator

[HOME]