MANAGEMENT SCIENCES INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: MSI"s Phase I efforts demonstrated a concept for massively distributed social problem

Description

MSI"s Phase I efforts demonstrated a concept for massively distributed social problem-solving that we propose to develop into a full-featured framework enabling communities to form solutions to complex, multi-factor problems. The ePluribus Solver is motivated by the"wisdom of the crowds"philosophy that proposes that a solution can emerge from a large, diverse group that is superior to a solution formed by a small group. We believe that if society is given a sufficient framework they will be able to collectively address many of the world"s challenges. ePluribus is designed to leverage the"viral"nature of social networks that causes ideas to spread rapidly and provide incentives to engage individuals in the problem solving process. The framework provides minimalist building-blocks for problem-solving while encouraging the emergence of new problem-solving processes. ePluribus enables users to collaboratively decompose complex problems into manageable components and work on them asynchronously. It then recomposes the components to form a collective solution from the diverse contributions and feedback of many problem-solvers. The fully featured ePluribus framework will manage the complexities of motivating, coordinating and integrating distributed solvers, allowing people to concentrate on what they do best reason about problems matched to their intuition, skills and experiences.