When it works it tends to work really well (e.g. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predictio...) but it's not very generalizable.
ADDED: To your example, I'm guessing there weren't any real experts in the group (or they were very outnumbered). So there was no "wisdom" of diverse experiences bringing something to the table.
You're right. It was overwhelmingly SV types.
However, as noted upthread some of the things would seem to be independent solutions, an ability to meaningfully aggregate those solutions, and some level of expertise in the crowd (i.e. if everyone's just making completely random guesses it won't work).
This "researcher" is attempting to go deeper and quantify it, maybe (I suspect) as a way of devaluing individual thinking.
As for internet, assume it's going to go down quickly, if you had any initially (I'd be surprised if a battery powered radio tuned to the ABC wasn't on the list).
It doesn't take much traffic to overload one 2-lane road.
So if we assume that's N, it still might not handle 10N.
I was about to say "these results are extremely unlikely to be replicable" until I saw that phrase: there are no results. She had some models. This sort of thing is hard to devise an experiment for.
I was once in a very complicated experiment designed to "prove" that group decision making was better : your group was at a house in the woods and you were trapped in an Australian bushfire. You had to pick 10 items as being important to your survival, both on your own and collectively as part of a group. Then those results were compared to the "experts" ranking; the experts being Australian fire fighters with tons of experience in this.
The results were pretty unconvincing; almost everyone, individually and collectively, got it wrong. Everyone thought "car keys" and "cell phone" were the most important. WRONG! Your car will get trapped in a traffic jam trying to get away and you'll burn, and the cell towers will be overloaded and your phone won't work. If you're curious, the most important was "long pants" and "long sleeved shirt" because exposed skin will burn most readily.Afterwards, our boss said "I was really pleased that our group really came together and arrived at the results collaboratively."
I said "Yeah, but we all died!"