Agile 2008 opened at the somewhat startling time of 8:30 with a keynote by journalist James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. He opened with an anecdote about the experiences of Francis Galton, famed both for statistical science and infamous as the coiner of the word 'eugenics', in relation to the surprising accuracy of the averaged guesses resulting from a fair guessing game as to the weight of an ox. And he then built upon this premise: that, under the right circumstances, the composite wisdom of a group will usually exceed the estimates of experts in the field.

He continued by backing this up with both parable and statistics. Guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar is a favourite fair game, and his claim was that over three or four attempts the average guess of the participants will outperform any individual within the group. He continued with 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire', claiming that while nominated experts will offer the correct answer two thirds of the time, polling the audience produces a correct result an impressive 91% of the time. Among other examples he referenced were Google's Pagerank - which determines the importance of a link by a count of the references to said resource - and NASA's ClickWorkers, a tool they created to use interested parties to classify craters and which produces an average accuracy equal to that of a trained geologist.

The important words are, as always, under the circumstances. After all, and as he commented, we are accustomed to consider a mob to have the lowest IQ of its constituents. And events too often prove us right on this score - from lynch mobs to panicked stockbrokers amplifying a crash we are frequently reminded that crowds will often show a surprising lack of wisdom.

He described these circumstances as requiring three preconditions. Firstly, you must be able to aggregate the judgements of the group. Secondly, the group requires diversity. This was comprised of several elements - apart from the obvious cognitive diversity, the requirement to avoid confirming a pre-chosen conclusion and avoiding groupthink came to the fore. Finally, one must ensure that the decision is that of the group, not of a dominant agent within the group. In order to benefit the outcome must be the aggregate of the individual outcomes within the group, rather than a uniform outcome created by peer pressure and a desire to conform.

His presentation was certainly compelling and communicated interesting information, if not desperately original. After all, such concepts have been at work in prediction markets for some time, and their success proves the concept much more effectively than a collection of theory. Nevertheless, bringing such concepts to the attention of an audience perhaps less exposed to such implementations can be naught but good, and it certainly provided a solid and polished opening to the event.

And creationism fits the bill nicely. Luckily, Scientific American has a convenient 15 point rebuttal to their rubbish. Hurrah.