COGNET: The Planetary Cognition Delivery Network

Crowd-powered innovation platforms act to a large degree as silos: they cater the cognitive surplus of a bespoke, selfselected audience to a limited amount of high-value clients in a model where both stakeholders typically have to jump through a series of hoops to enrol to the services. We propose a fundamentally disruptive way for discovery with distributed crowds, by orchestrating already established online audiences for serendipitous crowdsourcing. Two recent developments make our proposition, The Planetary Cognition Delivery Network, compelling right now. First, online properties are struggling due to declining advertising revenues, caused by the proliferation of ad-blockers and a few key Internet giants taking an increasingly larger cut of the available revenue. Second, and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively to the immediate perception in the Western world, the Internet is just now becoming widely available in many corners of the world, which provides an opportunity for a truly worldwide reach during the next decade or two. COGNET is designed to offer a frictionless participation mechanism for all three key stakeholders: requesters, providers, and contributors. It essentially orchestrates a distributed network of human cognition pools for arbitrary discovery tasks that could benefit from the vast cognitive surplus available through the internet.