Nesta, Cloudera Foundation, Omidyar Network and Wellcome Trust are pooling resources into a new £500,000 experimentation fund to help grow the emerging field of collective intelligence design.

Collaboration between the funders is a sign of growing interest in this field, which was named as one of the top issues to watch for 2019 by the European Parliament.

The fund will support experiments that help generate new insight and knowledge on how to design and apply collective intelligence to solve social challenges. It is open to non-profit organisations and charities, academic institutions, private companies, community organisations, and local authorities.

Organisations who are interested in applying for one of the £30,000 grants have until 11am GMT on Friday 25th October to submit their expression of interest.

Collective Intelligence Grants were launched last year by Nesta. They attracted over 200 diverse and high-quality proposals from all around the world.

Nesta is currently funding twelve experiments on topics ranging from improving group decision-making to sustaining crowd engagement with collective intelligence initiatives. Current grantees are working in fields as diverse as humanitarian relief, digital democracy, and education. The results of these experiments will be made publicly available in spring 2020.

Nesta defines collective intelligence as something that is created when people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise a wider range of information, ideas and insights to address a challenge.

For more information on criteria and eligibility and to find out how to apply, read the Call for Ideas.