Dealing with the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. Collective intelligence is now being applied worldwide by communities and governments to respond.

In its simplest form, collective intelligence is the increased capacity for action when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilize more information, ideas, and insights to solve a problem.

In recent years, advances in digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence - connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us generate new ideas from new sources of data. It is particularly well suited to dealing with complex and rapidly changing global problems, such as epidemics.

Here are seven ways it is addressing the coronavirus pandemic:

On December 31, 2019, health monitoring platform Blue Dot alerted its customers to the outbreak of an influenza-like virus in Wuhan, China: nine days before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement about it. It correctly predicted that the virus would spread from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo.

Blue Dot combines existing data sets to create new insights. Natural language processing, AI methods that understand and translate human-created text, and machine learning techniques that learn from large volumes of data, sift through animal disease outbreak reports, newsletters in 65 languages, and airline passenger information. Blue Dot supplements the machine-generated model with human intelligence, drawing on diverse expertise from epidemiologists to veterinarians and ecologists to ensure the validity of its findings.

The BBC conducted a citizen science project in 2018 that involved members of the public in generating new scientific data about how infections spread. People downloaded an app that monitored their GPS location every hour and asked them to report who they had met or come into contact with that day.

This collective intelligence initiative has created a tremendous wealth of data that has helped researchers understand who the "super-contaminators" are, as well as the impact of control measures on slowing an outbreak. While the dataset is still being analyzed, researchers have released data to help model the UK's response to COVID-19.

Created by a coding academy based on official government data, Covid-19 SG allows Singaporeans to see all known cases of infection, the street on which the person lives and works, the hospital to which they were admitted, the average recovery time, and the networked spread between infections. Despite concerns about potential privacy breaches, the Singapore government has taken the approach that transparency about infections is the best way to help people make decisions and manage their anxiety about what is happening.

For dashboard fans, MIT Technology Review offers a good overview of the many coronavirus-related dashboards following the pandemic.

In early February, Wired reported how researchers at Harvard Medical School were using citizen-generated data to track the disease. To do so, they mined social media posts and used natural language processing to search for mentions of respiratory problems and fever in places where doctors had reported potential cases.

This builds on evidence published in a January article in the journal Epidemiology that showed that hotspots in tweets could be good indicators of how a disease is spreading. It remains to be seen whether these initiatives are effective or whether they will succumb to the problems faced by Google Flu Trends.

The reality of people's experience of the virus has been largely absent from media reports to date, but the importance of social science in pandemic preparedness and response is increasingly recognized. So we should all salute the citizens of Wuhan who have archived and translated social media data from within China by collecting chronicles of testimonies from affected people, before they were censored by the government.

To speed up the development of drugs against coronaviruses, researchers at the University of Washington are inviting scientists and the public to play an online game.

The challenge is to build a protein that could prevent the virus from infiltrating human cells. The game can be found on Foldit, a 12-year-old website that has received contributions from more than 200,000 registered players around the world for important protein research.

In response to concerns about the lack of access to tests for COVID-19, Just One Giant Lab (a Nesta grantee) is spearheading an initiative to develop a rapid, low-cost coronavirus test that could be used anywhere in the world. The initiative involves gathering ideas from communities of DIY biologists, with the ambition of making them open source and sharing designs so that certified labs can easily produce test kits for their communities.

In this global crisis, sharing collective intelligence about the virus will be an important factor in our ability to respond and find new treatments. NextStrain brings together all the data from labs around the world that are sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and centralizes it in one place for people to see in a genome tree. This open repository, deployed on GitHub, helps scientists study the genomic evolution of the coronavirus and tracks how the virus is transmitted between people.

Researchers have also shared their new findings on the genomic profile of the virus through open source publications and preprint sites such as BioRxiv and Chinaxiv. Coronavirus-related content in scientific publications such as the BMJ is being temporarily removed, and the public is demanding that major news outlets follow suit.

Activists on Reddit have gone a step further: they have bypassed payment barriers to create an open archive of 5,312 research articles mentioning coronaviruses, citing a "moral imperative" to make research openly available. Newspeak House offers a handbook of tools, technologies and data for technologists building things to respond to the coronavirus epidemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also compiles all published research into a global database and makes learning resources on COVID-19 management available to health professionals and policymakers on the WHO e-learning platform. But they have also been criticized for not responding to comments left on their channels, leaving a vacuum instead of responding to rumors and falsehoods.