Design for the Wisdom of Crowds - SXSWi 2009

Quoted from the video : Taking a bunch of people and putting them in a room does not make them smart by definition. Four elements create wise crowds:

Diversity of opinion (large, diverse groups help avoid group think)
Independence (each contributor making his or her own choices)
Decentralization (no one person or authority is in charge)
Aggregation (to take all that noisy data and turn it into something smart)

Check out the book and also check out this in comparison to crowd sourcing which I blogged about here

Enjoy :)