Collective Intelligence against the Pandemic

A new institutional collaboration between the University of Oxford and WZB Berlin has just started with the project “Collective Intelligence against the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Civil Society in Endangered Democracies” co-coordinated by Thamy Pogrebinschi, a fellow with the Democracy and Democratization research unit at WZB, and Andreza A. de Souza Santos, a lecturer at the Latin American Center at Oxford University.

They seek to investigate the extent to which collective intelligence is a valuable resource for addressing public problems in countries with low state capacity and high social inequality. The project will pursue a case study in Brazil, the world’s third country most affected by the pandemic, in order to explore how civil society organizations have gathered and crowdsourced knowledge, information and data to improve government’s responses and directly address social problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic.