Howard Rheingold's Library tagged crowdsourcing →  View Popular

"The Conservatives have obtained another leaked document, a government report on public sector IT.

Laptop computerThis leak isn't likely to generate lurid headlines, as the report on transforming government by using "interactive (web 2.0) tools and processes, cloud computing technology and service-oriented architecture (SOA)" isn't exactly dynamite.

Still, the Conservatives have come up with quite a clever idea - they've put the document online and are inviting the public to comment on every part of it as they frame the party's response.

They've built a website called Make IT Better, and say their aim is " to throw open the process and allow people to contribute their ideas on how policy should be designed".

They're calling this "crowdsourcing" policy - but how far is it likely to go and will it prove a major feature of political engagement from now on?

The Conservatives say they've already used this idea back in 2007 to enlist the public's help in shaping their manifesto, with a site called Stand Up, Speak Up. "

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collective_intelligence crowdsourcing smartmobs

"Expert Labs is a new independent initiative to help policy makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens. How does it work? Simple:

1. We ask policy makers what questions they need answered to make better decisions.
2. We help the technology community create the tools that will get those answers.
3. We prompt the scientific & research communities to provide the answers that will make our country run better.

Each community provides its own unique expertise. And the end result is a government that uses the web not just to talk to citizens, but to listen to them.
"

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public_sphere crowdsourcing collective_intelligence

"Six Apart co-founder Anil Dash plans to reinvent the way the government listens to its citizens. We’re not talking about wiretapping. Rather, he wants to solicit expert opinions on scientific matters through a new social network belonging to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Expert Labs. Dash pumped his idea Wednesday afternoon during a keynote address at the Web 2.0 conference in New York.

The new Expert Labs social platforms, Dash said in a statement, have the potential to “make our government better, make our society better, advance scientific research and make people feel more connected to those social institutions that serve them.”"

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public_sphere crowdsourcing

"Hello and welcome to Victors & Spoils. Just who in the hell are we? We’re the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. And our goal is to provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging world’s most talented creatives."

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crowdsourcing

"Team-building and networking are more important than diversity
So what happened to the diverse crowd? In fact, the way hypios sees it, the right way to think about crowdsourcing is less Howe’s ‘it takes a village’ than it ‘takes a well-developed network.’ (We’ve already argued for this here and here). Better networking and collaboration tools allow the strongest solvers and teams of solvers to self-identify out of the crowd. Theories about crowdsourcing have correctly emphasized the fact that a marketplace for ideas is essentially social; however, they tend to over-emphasize the democratizing aspects. Crowdsourcing is an alternative, and superior, method for identifying exactly what Howe calls the MENSA team—highly-qualified and highly-trained specialists—by gleaning them from a much larger crowd.

According to Netflix stats, it took three years, over 44,000 valid submissions (from 180 different countries) and 5,169 different teams to best the CineMatch algorithm by a little more than 10%. Clearly, the most notable trend is that participants chose to collaborate by merging into larger and larger teams. As one PhD solver notes, the contest was all about team “agglomeration” where yesterday’s top losers banded up to tag-team today’s winners.

This capacity for iterative-rounds of team building, rather than the diversity of solvers, is probably the factor to isolate when we think about why various types of crowdsourcing work."

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crowdsourcing

"Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. and author of the book “Democratizing Innovation.”

Economists have long thought that producers — the people making products and running companies — are naturally the ones coming up with new ideas, Professor von Hippel said. In fact, he said, consumers often come up with ideas for products, and companies wait on the sidelines to see if they have mass appeal.

Technology companies have been the most active in relying on others to innovate for them. This is in large part because the Internet lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply.

The photo-sharing site Flickr started as a small part of a big online game. When the founders realized that the photo-sharing feature was more popular than the game, they scrapped the game and built Flickr. Open-source software companies leave innovation up to users, and companies like Bug Labs let people build their own hardware. "

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collective intelligence twitter innovation crowdsourcing

CrowdFlower easily connects you with thousands of people online, around the clock.

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crowdsourcing

iva initially allowed users to lend to entrepreneurs in developing countries. However, due to the American financial crisis, the company recently extended its mandate to help US entrepreneurs gain access to micropayment loans. As millions struggle to execute on their dream projects, a number of crowd based funding options have emerged. Below are a few of those tools:

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crowdsourcing

GPHIN and Google Flu Trends continue to save lives but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Google is now falling behind new competitors that dominate the ever growing real-time web. Status updates from Twitter and Facebook are being produced and becoming obsolete so quickly that Google’s index can’t keep up. We saw this with Michael Jackson’s death and we will see it again in the future.

Social media has the potential to become the greatest early detection system that the world has ever seen. It is faster, nimbler and has more access to user data than any traditional search engine. Not only does Facebook have the data necessary to see who is suffering from an illness, it has the data necessary to predict who these ill people will most likely come in contact with. Twitter has the data to make similar predictions (although less accurately because people don’t physically spend time with Twitter friends like they do with Facebook friends) but enjoys the added benefit of being accessed and updated from any place with mobile phone or WIFI service. (90% of Twitter requests are made to it's API, whereas only 12% of Facebook users access Facebook through it's mobile apps).

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search social_media crowdsourcing

Using crowdsourcing to annotate and confirm the attendance at historical events where no other form of attendance verification is possible.

People tend not to go to such events alone. People tend to notice who’s next to them, who else they spoke to. And we now have the tools to collate that collective knowledge.

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crowdsourcing collective_intelligence

What I have argued for a few years now, and what I am trying to make clear in my dissertation, is that crowdsourcing has the potential to work outside of for-profit settings. In fact, it may be a suitable model for solving government problems, supplementing traditional forms of public participation to help government make better decisions with more citizen input.

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crowdsourcing public_sphere collective_intelligence

Manifesto for the Reputation Society by Hassan Masum and Yi–Cheng Zhang

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.

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reputation credibility crowdsourcing filter search

Today the Birmingham Post publishes the first story to come out of the crowdsourcing platform I’ve been creating - Help Me Investigate. It’s about parking ticket hotspots in Birmingham*. UPDATE: The Birmingham Mail have also published a report, from which the map above comes.

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mapping crowdsourcing comm217

In this video, Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired and the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, presents during a Berkman Center Luncheon on some of the key issues around the concept, including:

* What motivates the contributors in crowdsourced efforts? Specifically, to what extent are monetary incentives a driver as compared to extra-monetary ones?
* What about “crowdsourced” projects which are not creative or knowlege-worker oriented, but outsourced menial labor?
* How can or should “creatives” respond to the rise of crowdsourced alternatives?

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crowdsourcing collaboration

I know from Bild staffers that Dieckmann dispatched them to buy a bunch of Flips in the U.S. (they weren’t available in Europe) and out of that came a fascinating business and news move: Dieckmann went to another manufacturer and created a Bild-branded video camera just like the Flip. The paper offered them for sale for 69 Euros. In five weeks, he sold more than 21,000 of them. Note well that the software on the camera defaults to sending video to Bild. So now the paper has thousands of cameramen all over Germany.

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crowdsourcing comm217 video

One of the first stories, which aired Thursday, focused on 200 people who packed into a room earlier this month to observe a Senate committee meeting. The journalists wondered who all those people were -- so they took photographs and tried to identify them.

Then the reporters put the question to their audience: "Can you help figure out who the rest are?"
Who are these lobbyists?
Robb Hill/NPR
NPR has asked for help in identifying the lobbyists who watched a Senate committee deal with health care legislation.

This isn't a massive, complicated crowdsourcing effort, and it's not the centerpiece of the project. But it is an example of turning a specific part of a reporting project over to the public to find out what they know.

www.poynter.org/column.asp - Preview

crowdsourcing

Patrick Meier of Ushahidi proposes mechanisms combining machine natural language processing with crowdsourcing to filter unverified data, like all the tweets and pix from Iran during the June ele ction crisis. "So we need to draw (and modify) relevant algorithms that are publically available and provide and a user-friendly interface for human oversight of the automated tagging (what we also referred to as crowdsourcing the filter)."

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crowdsourcing credibility tagging

There's a new business model in which the customers play an unaccustomed role -- as investors.

It's called crowd funding. Customers invest sometimes as little as $1 in a product -- often an album by a new musician, or clothes or jewelry from an aspiring designer.
The Journal Report

* See the complete Business Insight report.

The customers then help promote the product by posting messages on the Web. Their incentive: a cut of the profits in proportion to their investment. They share in the risks as well, but each person's risk is low because he or she is part of a crowd of investors.

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crowdsourcing sharing_economy

But not all forms of collaboration are equally powerful. In a previous post we pointed to emerging examples of a "collaboration curve" in which the more people and interactions you add to a carefully designed environment, the more performance improves.

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collaboration crowdsourcing

Crowd-sourcing geospatial information has definitely become a common component of recent breaking news stories. Flickr, Blogs, Maps, Twitter, YouTube, et. al. are all normal channels that people are turning to in order to share, follow, and re-broadcast reports, information, tidbits, thoughts, and actions. Most prevalently in this incarnation beginning with the San Diego fires, and more recently the Mumbai attacks, and now swine flu.

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crowdsourcing twitter comm217 geospatial