Takuya Homma's Library tagged CrowdSourcing →  View Popular, Search in Google

On June 27, 2006, we flipped the switch on TEDTalks, bringing talks from TED to the world for the first time. It was early days for online video — YouTube was just a year old; the video iPod had been around for six months — so we launched with six talks and modest goals, and have been amazed by what’s happened since. Five years and nearly 1,000 videos later, TEDTalks have been watched 500 million times, and translated into 81 languages by volunteers worldwide.

"Prizes.org is currently a beta product created by Slide, a small startup that operates within Google," a Google spokersperson explained in an email. "It's a place where you can win real cash prizes by coming up with the best ideas to help others out. People create contests on Prizes.org with real money bounties for anything they need, ranging from advice for the perfect weekend getaway, ideas for a best man's speech, to a plan for losing weight for summer."  

Google's spokesperson said that the long-term vision is to create a product akin to the X Prize Foundation for everyday people and everyday contests. 

• Web is the first medium that allows people to talk back but sometimes the conversation needs support to thrive
• Wisdom of Crowds theory shows that, in aggregate, crowds are smarter than any single individual in the crowd. See this online in most emailed features, bit torrent, etc.
• Wise crowds are built on a few key characteristics: diversity (of opinion), independence (of other ideas), decentralization, and aggregation.
• Bringing Wisdom of Crowds online: small simple tasks, large diverse groups, design for selfishness, result aggregation
• Small Simple Tasks: in many cases we are asking people to do a lot. Simple tasks bound interactions to a smaller range of options.
• Large Diverse Groups: the more people involved, the better the outcome. When things go wrong in wisdom of crowds, there is usually not enough diversity or size in the crowd.
• Design for Selfishness: when you see groups that end up in “group think”, it is usually because participants feel like they are responsible for the health of the community. But really only the admins are.
• Result aggregation: results are numbers, numbers become scores, and scores create games. This creates some unintended consequences. Need to align game play with something productive that supports the purpose of a site.

• Stanford prison experiment: Separated students into guards and prisoners. It was called off after six days due to abuses, riots, etc.
• This is the same thing that happens when some people are made wikipedia moderators and others are not.
• Trolls: their behavior is intended to elicit responses. They poke at people to get them to freak out. The troll is person that did something before someone else freaked out or the person trying to steer people toward controversy.
• Stopping trolls: silent treatment, disable puppets, timeouts.
• Silent treatment: the only person who can see what they post is the troll. They are hidden and no one gives them attention so they go away.
• Disable puppets: May also go away if you give them server errors or slow them down.
• Timeouts: deleting accounts sometimes creates more problems. Instead of deleting outright, parts of site can be put on hold for a day, hour, week, etc.

The ultimate crowdsourced site, Wikipedia, with its 276 languages, still leaves Facebook in the dust. But Facebook’s more than 100 language versions put it well above the average of 22 languages for global companies’ websites, Yunker says.

All those additional languages are driving much of Facebook’s astonishing growth—notably in Brazil, one of the last remaining strongholds of rival Google-owned social network Orkut. Facebook claims its 252 volunteer Brazilian Portuguese translators have submitted more than 150 000 translations of snippets from Facebook’s interface. Just 1350 untranslated phrases remained as of early May.

"Social media is all about connections," Frechette says. "There’s no stronger connection than literally speaking the same language."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has written a blog post in which he describes the central lessons about the craft he has tried to convey to students in the 25 years he has been teaching, and one of the main lessons is, “the more people who participate in the press, the stronger it will be.” In other words, while “crowdsourcing” and blogging and Twitter and other real-time publishing tools can produce plenty of noise, in the long run, journalism is better for it. Many traditional journalists may not like to admit this is true, but Rosen is right.

In his post, Rosen describes what still stands as one of the major triumphs of large-scale crowdsourcing: the “MP Expenses” project launched by The Guardian in 2009 to investigate financial disclosure by thousands of British MPs. More than 20,000 people combed through close 200,000 documents looking for irregularities, with a rate of participation that dwarfs virtually any other similar project (about 56 percent in the first iteration). Not only that, but the experiment was a brilliant competitive move as well: The Guardian’s competitor The Telegraph got the documents declassified originally, but it was The Guardian that made the best use of them.

• Anytime, Anywhere Access: view your maps from any computer or Internet-enabled device
• Speed & Scale: process your complex geospatial data quickly and efficiently; effortlessly scale to manage traffic spikes (for example, in cases of emergency)
• Lower Cost: significantly reduce IT costs and eliminate time spent buying, maintaining and patching software and servers
• Constant Innovation: just refresh the browser for the latest features
• Secure Storage & Recovery: no longer worry about storage limits and backups; data is backed up to multiple data centers for near-instant recovery

The Office of Management and Budget, which has the final word over every penny spent by federal agencies, recently commissioned establishment of a Website called Challenge.gov (scheduled to be available for public viewing sometime in September), in which agencies can post problems and challenges, offering financial or other rewards to individuals offering solutions and ideas. The site, to be run by the General Services Administration (GSA), will also include a voting process.

“It’s the next form of citizen engagement beyond participation to co-creation,” Godwin explains. The vision of the site is “to develop a challenge platform, so that the technology could be done once, and agencies could use this platform to create challenges, and have a lot of functionality around those challenges with social networking, etc., and also so the public can find federal challenges in one place.”

Today TED’s Open Translation Project published the 10,000th TEDTalk translation! In May 2009, we launched the translation project in an effort to bring TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world. We kicked off with 300 translations in 40 languages, and in just over a year, thanks to the power of crowdsourcing and the passion of our translators, the numbers have skyrocketed to 10,000 translations in 77 languages. Today over 5,000 volunteer translators participate in the project, some of whom have worked on hundreds of talks! (See “Our translators” page.) Thank you to all the translators for your hard work and commitment to spreading ideas around the globe.