Crowdsourcing

That's All Folks - For This Guest Blogger at Least

Well, I hope the last two weeks of Crowdsourcing were as good for you, dear readers, as they were for me. You can keep up with my at my personal blog or my experiment in crowdfunded journalism at Spot.Us, which (shameless plug) is now trying to raise money for its second pitch.

"Fact-checking political advertisements for the SF election." If you live in the Bay Area and want more than horse-race coverage, stand up and make it happen!
Learn more here and donate by clicking the image below.

For now, I turn the blog back to Jeff Howe who is the real genius that has captured the essence of "crowdsourcing" in his upcoming book.

Crowdsourcing Your Questions with Fluther

Apparently a "Fluther" is a flock of jellyfish.

I ran into a flock of jellyfish one time. Guess what, it wasn't cool.

This startup is better than the name suggests.

Live Chat from PSFK Conference

Guest blogging continues. After tomorrow you'll find me only at Digidave.org and Jeff Howe will take the reigns again.
For now: I'm at the PSFK conference in San Francisco
Coming up (15 minutes) is Ezra Cooperstein from Current TV and  Andrew Hoppin. Their talk is titled "Make it With Us." Sounds relevant, so I thought I'd live blog their talk. Let's see if this works (fingers crossed). You can chat with me if the widget below works.
Live Chat

Crowdsourcing Links and Updates

Update: I have a volunteer for my video experiment. I hope to do the experiment tonight to post it tomorrow, but unfortunatly I'm on the go today so internet access is iffy.

Crowdsourcing censorship: seems anti-antithetical doesn't it? Somehow the Chinese government is pulling it off. via Blurring Borders.

Harry Potter and the Wisdom of Crowds - nothing really new here, I just love that title. I picture Harry Potter crowdsourcing his magic spells.

Cambrian House Sells Its Wishing Well - via Crowdsource This.

I'm at the PSFK conference in San Francisco today. Hoping to talk to some smart trend-watchers about crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing Journalism - Echo

A quick update on something that caught my eye (for those who haven't caught on, because of Spot.Us and my past involvement in NewAssignment.net, I'm a bit of a journalism nerd).

Today J-lab announced the winners of a new media woman's entreprenuership grant. One of the winners is Lila King at iReport, for a project called Echo which spurs both citizen journalism and walking.

I like the idea because it is grassroots and focused. I really like the "walking" angle, it gives it a context and definition - something I think citizen journalism sites need to succeed.

And this post shouldn't just be taken as one colleague patting the back of another. In the past I've actually been very critical of iReport (that video was perhaps made too early, as I note they had JUST launched). And anybody who has been reading my posts should have a sense of how cynical I've become lately.

I think this is a move in the right direction for iReport. Earlier today a graduate student researching what newspapers can do to improve their web presence asked why some of the best efforts to produce citizen journalism networks by corporate newspapers have failed.

It's a good question.

I think one part of it is that they often feel forced and corporate. Crowdsourcing, whether it's design, journalism, etc, needs to feel grassroots and organic. Even if its a large company (CNN in this case) behind the wheel - the campaigns need to feel personal.

That's the feeling Echo gave when I watched the explanatory clip. Good luck Lila.

How to Crowdsource Your Life

Muhammad Saleem is a long time friend and a writer/thinker I admire. A few weeks ago he contacted me to see if I wanted to help him write his next e-book which will be on how to crowdsource your life.

My hands are pretty full, but since I'm guest-posting here at Crowdsourcing.com, I thought I'd check in with Mu and see how the book is coming along. (In reading the interview below, I'm happy to find out that the idea for the book came from Mu's involvement with NewAssignment.net a project I have been involved with since its inception).

1. So tell us about your book. From what I understand it's all about how one can "crowdsource their life." What does that mean exactly?

The book I'm working on essentially focuses on the principles of crowdsourcing, and takes a step-by-step approach to helping the readers use those principles in every facet of their lives. The idea is that crowdsourcing isn't just limited to projects like Wikipedia, but it can be used for any aspect of your life.

2. What is the inspiration for the book? What made you decide to focus on this? Was there a personal event that made you realize this was something worth researching? Or - is it the result of carefully monitoring trends?

It all started when I first interviewed Stephen Buckley from MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence. When I asked him why systems like Wikipedia or projects like Linux thrive in the absence of monetary rewards, his response is what triggered the idea for this book:

The incentive structures are different [with Linux], because you run into a different kind of culture, the engineering culture. The rewards system in an engineering culture is elegance and functionality and so it’s a read ego boost for an engineer to create a piece of software that becomes the object of adulation for his fellow engineers. All this is to say that we will probably find that in different types of situations there will be different kinds of cultures, and different sets of incentives that motivate those cultures to work collectively.

That is precisely the idea behind the book. First I want to create a concrete framework around the concept of crowdsourcing and then I want to research the specific cultures and sets of incentives necessary to motive a large group of people to the point where one can crowdsource his/her life.

3. What are some of the easy ways people can start crowdsourcing their lives right away?

The most commonplace examples of crowdsourcing right now are citizen journalism (newassignment, assignmentzero, ireport) and collaborative programming (any open source project, linux, open office, top coder, cofundos), and design (crowdspring, 99designs) . What you'll find is that many of the other ways to crowdsource your life are actually sites and services people are currently using but don't consider to be crowdsource projects or platforms.

Read/WriteWeb did a good job recently of breaking down some of these services.

4. Is this the "lazy way out" - or does crowdsourcing your life take a lot of work?

I don't think it's a lazy way out. What people don't understand about crowdsourcing is that it takes time and it takes effort. What crowdsourcing does, and why it's so great, is that it distributes the tasks among the people most suited to perform them and uses the groups intelligence to weed out those that are unsuited.

5. What would be some of the potential downfalls of it all? Could one "miss out on the best things in life" because they are trying to give them all away?

This question is certainly something that an Andrew Keen would ask. I think the system is not perfect but that's only because we haven't figured out the right incentives to motivate the people. Any crowdsourced project needs a platform that can simultaneously motivate people and aggregate/filter through the contributions to put the best results first. These systems will continue to improve as we better understand crowdsourcing and as more people participate in the process.

A Proposal to Get Covered on Crowdsourcing.com

Sorry for the late blog post - I'm a little busier than normal today because of  Social Media Camp which made it to San Francisco today. In the intro session the host defined social media in a fashion that didn't mesh with me. This isn't an exact quote but it was something to the tune of.

"Social media is when people use new technology tools to for word of mouth marketing."

What bugs me was the word "marketing." I Tweeted (just before I lost all internet connections). "I dislike when people define social media as "marketing" - can't it just be "sharing information." Please don't turn everything into selling." - I got some good responses too.

This also goes back to the last post about why some people dislike the word "crowdsourcing." But I will remind readers - you can crowdsource art, films, journalism, crowdfund anything, etc.

So I thought I'd try an experiment.

As noted in some of the responses I got via Twitter. This is America, people are constantly selling and there is no way around it. Fair enough. I get press releases all the time. In fact, in just the short time I've been guest posting here I've started getting crowdsourced news.

In fact just today I got a press release about my friend Debbie Galant's website Baristanet.

The news: "Clever Commute, the nation's leading crowdsourced network of real-time transit alerts, is partnering with Baristanet.com, the nation's leading placeblog, to provide up-to-the-minute rider-supplied news about transit problems between New York and New Jersey.

The data now appears on Baristanet's website as soon as riders share their alerts."

Since this is a guest-blogging position and I aim to have fun with it - let's try a little experiment (heheh... Jeff isn't here to stop me).

THE EXPERIMENT!!!!

1. As of now, anyone has potential to be the focus of my next post on Crowdsourcing.com. Yes - you and your garage-based startup could end up on this blog which is part of the Wired News network. We will link to you and focus the entire content of the post on what you are doing. All you need is to have a startup/project/something that is related to crowdsourcing. (EMAIL ME)

2. You will have to get on AIM, Skype or some other video conference technology so I can interview you (recorded).

3. And here's the catch: I will play the part of "mean interviewer." I will actively try and find flaws in your site, system or idea. I will pretend its been a bad day and nobody has brought me coffee. Get the picture?

But - if you can make a good case for what you are doing, if you can convince me, the curmudgeon, I will admit defeat and will sing your praise from there on out. And - you will have a video representation of you convincing a cynical jerk about the merits of your project.

Essentially I'm inviting anyone into a game of conversational poker. Show me what you got, I'll show you mine and you have the potential to come out looking good.

WHY THE EXPERIMENT?

Cause I'm tired of blogs that are essentially in bed with PR companies. This is especially rampant in the tech-scene. The most popular tech blogs get press releases daily, pick the best ones, call that reporting, and then spit them back out to you.

What I want to see is that same system but without drinking the koolaid for every pitch. I think the end result could be more useful for consumers.

Crowdsourcing Links and Question of the Day

• Here's a new startup that sounds interesting. Intelligence-Tools

"The idea here is similar to Mechanical Turk, but with a twist. We place all prices on the system in a market similar to the NYSE. This allows for instantaneous completion (or at least contracting/assignment) of tasks."

Example: Check out their document editor. You paste your text in a box and get a quote for editing. That quote is only good for 15-minutes, so think fast.. Currently the system doesn't have editors and I imagine right now Intelligence-Tools has the same problem most crowdsourcing startups do. How to get critical mass.

• Checking in on Spot Us

We have news. Our first pitch has been successfully crowdfunded. That only took 10 days! Perhaps there is something to "community funded reporting." But as I note in the Idea Lab blog, it's too early to start waving hands and claiming success. Still, I believe a w00t is an order.

 

• via Scripting Enabled

"A few weeks ago a lot of Tweets, emails and instant messages started chatting about a new system that would allow screen reader users to fix issues with web sites in a crowdsourcing manner: WebVisum"
Read the interview with Marc Dohnal, the initiator of WebVisum.

Note: IBM has their own crowdsourced project to tackle the accessibility of the web. Social Accessibility Project.

• I like this post on strategies for harnessing group potential.

"The first is what I’d call the “million monkeys” strategy.....More exciting is truly collaboratively crowdsourcing"

• This brings me to the question of the day!!!

What are the criteria through which crowdsourcing does and doesn't work.

Often people ask: "is this a good thing to throw crowdsourcing at." As if crowdsourcing were Dungeons and Dragons and "crowdsourcing" was a spell you can caste. No, crowdsourcing isn't magic and you can't just sprinkle it on websites and make everything viral.

Example - Crowdsourcing is great if you want to write an encyclopedia entry about a specific automobile maker. Proof.
But there are certain things I would never trust the crowd to do.
Examples: Brain surgery (especially my brain), fly an airplane (especially my flight), raise a child (especially my child and yes, that is despite the 'it takes a village' saying). I think you get the idea.

Crowdsourcing can be very powerful but it can also be destructive. I'm willing to bet that even Jeff Howe would agree - there are times when you DON'T want to employ crowdsourcing. So my question again is "what are the criteria through which you can determine if crowdsourcing should/should not be applied."

Let's Talk Semantics: What Do You Think of the Word "Crowdsourcing"

It's a good week for me to be guest blogging. The topic of "crowdsourcing" was brought up by none other than Dave Winer, who recently explained in response to a Twitter question from Jay Rosen, why he doesn't like the word. I obviously can't speak on behalf of Jeff Howe, but since I've also given the topic thought I'll at least put my thoughts on the table.

Dave writes...

I don't like it cause it's cheap, it's always used by people who want something for nothing....Bottom-line: I don't think of myself as part of a crowd when I write on the Internet. When you describe me that way I don't like it.

As you can see in the comments, I've gone back and forth with the word myself - but have made my peace which I'll explain below. For proof of how long I've been mulling over the word "crowdsourcing" see this NewAssignment post which I edited in late 2006. In it Chris Messina and Tara Hunt brought up a point that stuck with me for some time which is that "crowdsourcing" sounds like exploitation. I believe that ethos comes from its relation to "outsourcing" which in the 80's had a successful campaign to turn it into something un-American and the source of many woes. As a child of the 80's outsourcing to me = bad.

Another reason why I had issues with the word was just because I suffered from overload. I worked on Assignment Zero which was "crowdsourced journalism" and from there I was Jeff Howe's research assistant on the book "crowdsourcing." I don't think anybody can blame me for being overloaded. I spent my fair share of time using it a lot and after the book was done being researched it disappeared from my vocabulary completely.

But now that I've had time to step back and decompress I no longer have qualms with the word. Why? Well first, let's take a closer look at what Dave wrote in his piece.

"One more reason -- it's not useful because it doesn't actually model what's going on. In the 20th century everything was about mass markets and centralization. You could explain things with concepts like crowds. In this century we're going the other way."

Here's where I have to respectfully disagree with Dave. I think the word "crowdsourcing" is VERY useful for describing what is happening. Yes, there is a lot of one-to-one conversation that is happening, but there is still (and always will be) one-to-many conversations. Except now those conversations can be interactive. You can SOURCE the crowd you are marketing your message to. You can ask them for feedback.

In fact, I'd argue that mass marketing isn't disappearing, it's increasing. I can now mass market myself if I want! Twenty years ago it would have been very difficult for a 26-year-old nobody to market themselves. The cost of marketing you or your product has gone down. And the ability to rely on the crowd to help you define your product/positioning, etc, is easy because the modes of communication are there. Just because the audience can talk back doesn't mean they aren't an audience. It just means the relationship is different and you can make them part of the process.

I can't think of another word that captures the phenomena of Wikipedia, iStockphoto, Threadless, etc, better than crowdsourcing. Perhaps I could think of a phrase, but a single word? Believe me, if I had a better word I'd put it in this post and then I'd have the book coming out this August. But the truth is - crowdsourcing is a single word that captures it very well.

I think because of its seeming connection to "outsourcing," crowdsourcing gets a negative connotation even before people take the time to become familiar with how it's defined. This is too bad, because I think the word could also be connected to "open source" which leaves a great taste in people's mouth. In fact one way of describing "crowdsourcing" is: "the application of open source practices to fields outside of software."

Let's take a look at the white paper definition: "the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call."

I understand Dave's point: Nobody wants to be "part of the crowd." But people do want to be winners. To be a "winner" you have to be picked out from the crowd. That's the Threadless model. There are countless crowdsourcing startups that rest on the notion of competition and reward. Take Innocentive, they create a small marketplace with crowds where somebody comes out a winner, having produced something of high value - and they are rewarded. So it's not exploitation, nobody is forced into anything and like all things if people are good at what they do - they are rewarded. Want to prove you are a "winner" - first you need to rise up amongst the crowd. If you aren't competing, you can't be a winner.

As Dave notes you wouldn't say to your wife she was "part of the crowd you were thinking of marrying" and I certainly wouldn't recommend that. But that description isn't inaccurate. And as Dave knows - it's all about positioning. You might say to your wife "of all the women in the world, you were the one for me." Both statements are accurate, but the second one won't put you in the dog house. So - whether or not a company uses the word "crowd" (and I can understand why it's less appropriate at times) the fact is - the 'crowd' is part of the scenario.

I'd rather call a spade a spade then pander to my personal notions of self-importance. Yes, I am part of the crowd. That doesn't mean I can't be a winner, produce original work and get recognition for it. That isn't easy - but neither is life. And guess what, you live it amongst a crowd. Let's not pretend that the crowd doesn't exist.

From Fight Club: "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

Quick Video Interview: Art Head

On the topic of crowdfunding....for art, try Art Head (coming very soon).

Crowdsourcing Links for the Day

• The latest news from "A Swarm of Angels."

"Anyone currently joined up at A Swarm of Angels has the opportunity to be immortalized in our next film trailer as one of 'The Missing'. We're crowdsourcing and gathering photo's of people in the simplest way we could think of for members to contribute visually to a fake propaganda film which is an open source trailer for The Ravages. Of course, people are also getting more involved in the production etc, too."

• CrowdSpring: Their model allows anyone to post a job for a creative service (logo, web page, etc.) and then choose from designs submitted by crowdSPRING's global community of creatives. Reminds me a bit of TopCoder, but for design work (update: TopCoder has informed me that they have designers in their community who do front end work as well).

And for good measure: The argument against Crowdspring.

• Pixish: Connecting image makers with the buyers. It comes to us from Derek Powazek who I met via Newassignment and Assignment Zero. He continues to do cool things. I hope to speak with him about Spot Us soon.

• David Pogue dreams up a brilliant crowdsourcing project. Hat tip Mark Harmel. "We need somebody to create a Web 2.0 site where we, the masses, can report the signal strengths of our carriers. We’d report dead spots. We’d report where we get five bars. We’d eventually develop an amazing, and amazingly accurate, collaborative map of the United States, color-coded to show the truth about each cell company’s coverage. C’mon, guys. Let’s harness the wisdom of the masses. Let’s change the world. Who’s up for the challenge?"

Crowdsourcing Your Research

Okay readers - the guest posting continues. I'm your host Digidave while Jeff Howe is out of town.

Earlier today I asked if there were tools people use to crowdsource their research? Thinking through the course of the day - I came up with three tools to crowdsource your research, but I'm sure there are others (Wikipedia doesn't count, that's too obvious).

1. Twitter

Yes, the micro-blogging service. It's more than just a way to bore your friends with updates on your random whereabouts and meals. It is a great tool to do research. Beth Kanter put it best in this post, which I'm happy to say was inspired by a comment I left.

"Can I get the answer faster from Google or Twitter? What's the atomic number for Radium? So, I put the question out to Twitter network and then before I could google it, Jim Thompson answered.  And so did 5 people in my network, plus one person gave me a source page.  It was slightly faster and more direct than googling it - but google was quick."

I often find that for trivial pursuit-esque questions, if you have a wide enough network, Twitter can provide fantastic results. This isn't any different from using the audience as a lifeline in "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" - except you don't need Regis. With Twitter, you can ask the audience all you want.

As a journalist I often use Twitter to do research on a subject. Or, if I'm in a panic to help me think of questions to ask an interviewee. That's what I did when I only had 30 minutes to prep before a phone call with Craig Newmark, someone I greatly admire (ie: my brain was going blank).

2. Mechanical Turk.
Should need no explanation. But just to give an anecdote - I believe Jeff Howe (the real author of Crowdsourcing.com) uses Mechanical Turk to crowdsource transcription. I'm personally thinking about hiring somebody to do all my typing. How much do you think that would cost? Perhaps it's a stretch to call transcription "research" but it is certainly part of any academic endeavor and part of the daily routine for lots of jobs. In terms of "research" classically understood (browsing through books), Mechanical Turk could work - but I wouldn't recommend it. Those are tasks that require a certain level of mental engagement that you can't ensure through MT. But it's totally possible to find the perfect Turker for your research and I'm sure it's used all the time.

3. Mahalo - the human powered search company started by Jason Calacanis. It takes seconds to create a search request on Mahalo. And believe it or not - the staff are happy to do the digging on the internet to help find you answers. Hat tip to Tony Hung for tipping me off to this one. He writes...

[On Twitter] if you send a suggestion to @MahaloToDo, they’ll create a page in a couple days.

Out of fun, I decided to suggested a fairly obscure topic: Capgras Syndrome, to see how they’d do with it.  Here’s the actual page, as they got it done yesterday, which is pretty sparse, but to be fair, its a pretty sparse topic.

I can also vouch for this. A friend asked if I knew how to research the history of some obscure legal precedent (so obscure I can't even remember what it was). So, I contacted somebody at Mahalo and two days later - I had more research on it than I really thought was possible.

Then of course there are the specific work needs. If you don't want "research" but you need design, coders, pictures, etc. there are a TON of sites with verticals. I don't know of any that have a "research" vertical, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's on the horizon (or if the college kids just keep that one under their hats).

To learn more about the vertical crowdsourcing sites - I'd start with Read Write Web's Guide to the Crowdsourced Workforce.

Any other ideas? Leave a comment!!!

Crowdsourcing Links and Questions

What I hope to post on later today: "Tools to crowdsource your research." What internet tools do you use? Leave a comment - let me know and I'll write about it more later.

Elsewhere on the web.

• nvohk: That's not a typo, it's the name of a crowdsourced clothing company. From the article: "The tagline on nvohk (pronounced invoke) says it’s “an eco-clothing company managed by the people who wear it.” Having officially launched at the end of June, the company already has over 300 activated members and thousands queued up in what is one of the latest and maybe one of the more innovate examples of crowdsourcing.

• Show Us a Better Way: The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. Crowdsourcing is showing up in a lot of interesting places. In one week they already have 150 ideas and counting. via TheZonedRead

• The Brooklyn Museum is hip to this internet thing. Their current show, “Click!” (note the dot-fun exclamatory spelling!) is the latest in what seems to be a slew of museum shows to pick-up the theme of “crowdsourcing.” via Panic (re) Programming.

The Volunteer Surplus - Can You Volunteer in Five Minutes or Less?

You're at the airport and your plane gets delayed 20 minutes. What could you do with that "found" time that would be productive?

That's the question Volunteer Now (a new project from Mobile Voter) is seeking to answer. Yesterday I went to a Netsquared meetup, hosted by the talented Britt Bravo, where the founder of Mobile Voter explained the concept.

The idea is simple - if you are a lawyer, review a document for a nonprofit. If you are a doctor answer a medical question sent to an anonymous "Dear Abby" type account. Or if you speak another language, do five minutes of translation. No matter what your skill - you can probably donate a little expertise to somebody who needs it to further a good cause.

It reminded me a post I did for Spot Us on the "gift economy." In it I was essentially asking how big the gift economy is and how much of it could be tapped to support journalism?

Well, how big is the "bored out of my mind" economy? Take all those 20 minutes and add them up. I can only venture a guess as to how many hours we spend standing in line. As the mobile phone becomes a tool to be productive the spare volunteer minutes could be racked up. The trick would be finding a way for people to volunteer in a meaningful way in just five minutes.

This brings me to an amazing video from Clay Shirky. I have listened to this lecture six times or more now. 

Now, if you watch the whole video, you should be able to tie this post together in your head instantly. If not - I'll try and summarize but will urge you to take 10 minutes and watch this video, cause it's mind blowing.

We are slowly awaking from a period of "mass boredom." Before the Internet (and I am old enough to remember) when my father came home from work he sat right down in front of the T.V. and we knew not to bother him for at least an hour and a half. Understandably so - he needed to unwind. This unwinding period was followed by dinner and then more television watching, because there was nothing else to do. Thank god for "The Simpsons," a show we could all watch together.

The routine today is a bit different. After dinner he doesn't return to the television - he goes straight to the computer. Some of his activities on the computer are passive, but some are active. He has changed his daily pattern and has removed some passive media consumption time and replaced it with active media participation.

Now imagine how that shift could work with our spare minutes waiting in line or on a train.

Crowdsourcing Projects You May Not Have Heard About

We all know about Threadless, Kiva, Current TV, iStockPhoto and other staples of the crowdsourcing world. But what's so fascinating about the concept is just how easy it is to employ by any Internet startup.

Every day I come across new innovative uses of crowdsourcing. Here are a few on my radar this morning.

Know of any other crowdsourcing startups? Leave them in the comments.

• Studio Wikitecture: "Improving Architecture and City Planning by Harnessing the Ideas behind mass collaboration, social networking, wikis, folksonomies.....etc etc etc."
• StrayForm: "A community where                           artists and fans can thrive with no DRM, no commericals                           and no corporate middle-men." Reminds me a bit of Deviant Art with a more 2008 look and feel.
• Knewsroom: This startup has been pronounced dead in just under 38 days. Funny - I gave it at least 50 days. Man, I wish I had written a blog post about how bad an idea this was so I could say "told ya so" right now. Of course - I can't talk about Knewsroom without discussing its parent company Kluster. I have sharp opinions about this New York startup. Too much for a link post - so I'll move on for now, but perhaps will revisit later.
• Crowdsourcing the Genome. "To speed up that process, a group of scientists has harnessed the Internet through Wikipedia."
• The BigCarrot - I'm fascinated by sites like this, ThePoint and Community Goals. It's hard to pin them down as "crowdsourcing." But - notice I'm using ThePoint right now to crowdfund for journalism. These sites represent a new age in collective action.
• YouBundle - an early startup that looks to be an evolution of Digg and Squiddo, but it's too early to call.

Spot Us Reporting: Crowdfunding in Journalism

*disclaimer at the bottom.

So what is Spot Us?: Spot Us is a nonprofit that allows an individual or group to take control of news in their community by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists. The short answer - Spot Us will pioneer "community funded reporting" and will start in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It is very much inspired by Kiva.org and DonorsChoose. In fact, Spot Us developed as an idea while I was helping Jeff Howe work on the crowdfunding chapter of his upcoming book.

Essentially I'm trying to figure out if collective action (ala Clay Shirky), in the form of donations, can be used to create a new business model for journalism, an industry that is in dire need of an adrenaline boost. It is very much an outgrowth of citizen journalism, but postulates that people value their time more than money. In other words: It is far easier for people to participate in investigative journalism by donating money than it is for them to donate their valuable time.

The challenge: We are just starting out but I can already identify one of our biggest challenges. Finding people who value good journalism. Let's take a concrete example.

We have our first pitch: Right now Spot Us is using a wiki to accept pitches and is fundraising with ThePoint as a third party e-commerce solution (this is pre-prototype experimentation to get a proof of concept).

And the very first pitch we received is fantastic. It comes from an experienced journalist (from Wired.com) and would tackle an important topic: that ethanol might be the weak link in California's energy network. You can find details of the pitch here and can even donate to the pitch by clicking the image below.

The writer is asking for well below market value because he "has been wanting to do this story for a long time." In fact, all this story needs is 20 people to donate $10 each or 8 people to donate $25. As I see it: We have an important story, from a qualified writer, willing to do it at a price that could only be described as "a steal." I have no doubt in my mind that there are 20 people out there who would be willing to donate $10 to ensure that this story is reported and told. But how do I find them?

This is the difficulty that any crowdfunding project must face. How do you find and target potential donors?

One site that has come to my attention recently is SocialActions which hopes to produce an API to search across 19 different micro-lending sites (see interview with SocialActions). At a higher level, SocialActions is trying to tackle an incredibly important hurdle: How do volunteers and projects that need volunteers find each other?

Right now each crowdfunding project does its own outreach. Efforts are duplicated and probably done with little or no effect for some. This is where SocialActions can come into play. Helping volunteers find nonprofit organizations that need to crowdsource some of their labor, with the full support of each crowdfunding project - by pooling their collective outreach efforts.

One question I have: How will SocialActions decide who gets to be included in the search? Take StrayForm, a crowdfunding project for the arts. One might not consider them a "social good" - but they certainly need to find people who will volunteer their time.

That question aside: All crowdfunded projects face this delima. They are all built on the assumption that what they hope to produce is worth small donations from interested parties - but they need to find those interested parties.  The second the ethanol pitch was created - I looked it over and realized that it would be of interest to people concerned about the environment, California, ethanol or clean energy. The question is how to get those people to act.

Even Kiva.org faces this problem, although one could argue they've reached critical mass. Kiva relies entirely on organic growth but they are constantly looking for ways to tap into new audiences. Just this morning Kiva announced a new video campaign using Involver's Facebook application and I'm told has already generated over 1000 hits (UPDATE: See comment below on some incredible stats). That's the beginning of organic (ideal) growth. 

The cool long term affect of the Facebook app is the ability to track the power users, and find out who is participating by age, sex and geography. I suspect that the Facebook application will give them new demographics (younger) from what they are traditionally used to seeing via their website. But I guess that's the ticket - finding ways to tap into a wider audience which means there are more people likely to act.

You can find the Kiva.org campaign page on Facebook here:

disclaimer: As promised in the intro post - I will keep discussion about my crowdfunding startup Spot Us to a minimum while guest blogging here at Crowdsourcing. And to ensure that, I have written this blog post first so I can now leave it alone unless it seems absolutely relevant.

For the Next Two Weeks of Crowdsourcing

Hello Crowdsourcing readers. My name is David Cohn and Jeff Howe has asked me to pitch in here at the Crowdsourcing blog for the next two weeks while he is away.

A little background on me: I am no stranger to crowdsourcing. I've been writing about the concept at Wired since before the phrase was coined - whether "Open Source Biology," or musicians entrusting their fans to design album logos.

I met Jeff during the Assignment Zero project and since then have been Jeff's research assistant on the upcoming book "Crowdsourcing" which regular readers here are familiar with.

During that time I became fascinated with Crowdfunding and after pitching it to the Knight News Challenge, I received funding to figure out how crowdfunding could be applied to journalism. The project, Spot Us, is my attempt to pioneer community funded reporting. You can always find out more about me on my personal blog Digidave.org.

Why am I here: Jeff is away for the next two weeks and asked me to pitch in. Should be fun for all of us.

What I intend to write about: I have an obvious interest in crowdfunding and so my next post will be about my project Spot Us and crowdfunding in general. I promise - once I've gotten that out of the way, I will devote this blog to crowdsourcing as a general topic and will refrain from pimping out my own work (although I highly recommend it).

For the next two weeks I will attempt two blog posts a day. The morning post will be links. Any crowdsourcing news that catches my eye. The afternoon (or evening) post will be a closer look at one of those links or some other crowdsourcing news (might also be directed by reader feedback). I'll try to keep the preaching to a minimum, but hey - it's a blog and Jeff trusted me as a guest blogger because he knows I have opinions about crowdsourcing - so I'll share where appropriate.

How you can help: It would be silly of me, especially on a blog titled "crowdsourcing," not to ask the audience for help. So - if you have specific topics you've always wanted to see discussed here at crowdsourcing, don't hesitate to leave a comment. On a daily basis - please email me with links to any news worthy of note here at Crowdsourcing.

Meet David Cohn

I've just landed in the Catskills for a two-week vacation with Alysia and the tots. It's been nearly two years since we've had anything approaching a real vacation, and the first period of relaxation since the writing of the crowdsourcing book and the birth of our second child, so I hope you'll forgive me if I say it's well-deserved.

In the interim I've secured for your entertainment and edification the inimitable David Cohn. David and I first met through our work together on Assignment Zero, though David had actually interned for Wired in San Francisco a few years before that. David provided the grease that made Assignment Zero work, and I was so impressed with his smarts and diligence that I brought him on as my primary research assistant for the book. But David doesn't just write about crowdsourcing—he practices it too! A few months back David was awarded a prestigious Knight-Batten grant to form his own crowdfunding journalism project, Spot.us, a project I'm proud to day arose out of some of the research David did for my chapter on crowdfunding. I've asked him to devote a few blogs to Spot.us, but suffice to say I think it represents an exciting model for pursuing crowd-powered investigative projects.

If you need me over the next two weeks, check one of several small Catskill creeks. I'll be the guy trying to convince his not-quite-three-year old daughter that fish don't bite.

Updata

Despite the lack of activity on the crowdsourcing blog, there's much afoot in the crowdsourcing world. First off, the publication date of the Crowdsourcing Book is now August 26th. This is great and terrifying news. The fall is prime publishing season, the time when houses release all their biggest books. It's also smack dab between the Democratic and Republican conventions and the general election in November. Conventional wisdom holds that politics sucks all the air out of the room, so the fact Crown is confident enough to put my book up against the tide is an honor. I hope the book will perform well enough to meet their expectations.

I've spent much of the last month tying up final loose ends on the book and on the road doing more speaking engagements (Amsterdam—again—Austria and the Jersey Coast!). But at last the book is totally and completely done. I can't say I'm quite ready to write the sequel (or any other book), but it has been an immensely gratifying experience, both on personal and creative levels.

Finally, a bit of bad news. We've had to put the Crowdsourcing Appendix on hold for the time being. What this means is that we won't be running an appendix with reader comments in the first edition. We simply didn't have enough time to publish the rest of the excerpts and collect the comments into a publishable form. I'm to blame for this—I should have started the program a few months earlier. It's far from naught, however: The comments, and additional ones to be solicited following publication of the book, will be published in a subsequent edition of the crowdsourcing book, either in the form of an appendix or (as would be my druthers), in the marginalia, a la Clive Thompson's piece in Wired last March.

Chapter 8: What the Crowd Creates: How the One Percent Is Changing the Way Work Gets Done

We have a deadline! I have to file all the comments for the book a week from Friday. Expect the next postings to come fast and furious. Once again: I'm posting excerpts from my book on crowdsourcing to Crowdsourcing.com in order to elicit comments about its content from readers. The most trenchant of those comments will be gathered into an appendix that will be published as a chapter in the book. Here's the last sections—the denouément, if you will—to Chapter Eight:The Price of Being a Pioneer

The Price of Being a Pioneer

If I sound sympathetic to the predicament Current TV faced in its first forays into crowdsourcing, it’s because I spent the first half of 2007 making the same mistakes. In that time I helped run an experimental journalism project called Assignment Zero, an attempt to use crowdsourcing to conduct an extensive, far-reaching journalistic investigation. It was a pioneering effort and it’s true what they say about pioneers: They’re the ones with arrows in their backs. In the end, I came to think of Assignment Zero as a highly satisfying failure. On one hand we failed to meet our optimistic goals; on the other hand, by charging heedlessly into uncharted territory, we learned a great deal about how the crowd can come together to create great journalism. The basic principles behind successful crowdsourced journalism aren’t much different than those behind successful crowdsourced television or photography.

Assignment Zero was a joint effort between Wired and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism initiative started by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. In early 2006 Rosen began conceiving of a journalism project that would involve both professional and amateur contributors. But Rosen needed funding to staff up with the professionals he would need. Later that year he flew to San Francisco to meet with Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Wired.com. Newly acquired by Condé Nast, Wired.com was looking to experiment broadly and boldly, particularly in the realm of so-called “citizen journalism.” It was a fortuitous meeting, and together the two created Assignment Zero, indicating the nascent character of citizen journalism. The aim was to have a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond. We would use the crowd, in other words, to cover crowdsourcing. Having coined the term in a June 2006 Wired article, I was brought in as a consultant. We launched in March 2007 with the intention of producing 80 feature articles—enough to fill a dozen magazines—over the course of 12 weeks. The result, we wrote when launching the project, would be "the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing." We would post the features on NewAssignment.Net, and run a selection of the best stories on Wired.

Chapter 8: The Interlude ... User-Generated Content in History

The wonderful thing about writing a book (It's nice to know that sentence has appeared more frequently in this blog than, "The awful thing about writing a book") is that there's no one to tell you not to devote a few thousand words to idle speculation. A big theme in the Crowdsourcing Book is that the rise of amateurism is hardly some unprecedented effect of our current techno-historical moment, but in fact the manifestation of a universal human impulse that our current array of technologies just happens to serve. In other words, as much as things change, so they stay the same. I explore this in several parts of the book, including this bit from Chapter Eight:

Before You Know Where You're Going, You Have to Know Where You've Been

There was a time when almost all culture would have been considered “user-generated content.” Earlier I noted that many of the greatest artistic and scientific achievements were made by people we would now call amateurs. But even this observation diminishes the contributions made by the forgotten part-time poets and Sunday painters who created glorious, if ultimately ephemeral, works that were valued in their day, even if only by their close circle of acquaintances.

Before the rise of mass reproduction—the era in which photography, film, the phonograph, and the radio gave rise to the commoditization of cultural products— there was far less of a distinction between audience and creator. The centuries preceding the industrial era were characterized by a more complex and interactive relationship between creators and their audiences. New musical compositions were distributed as sheet music, which could then be interpreted according to regional preference and individual whim. In what was still a largely agrarian society, popular entertainment of the Victorian era took the form of regional theaters, church sermons, Saturday dances, and all manner of parlor games. Entertainment was a private—or at most a regional—affair comprised of people entertaining one an- other. There were very few cultural products that we would describe as “hits” by today’s standards.

This changed quickly and dramatically with the rise of modern technologies such as the phonograph, the radio, and the cinema. The mass production and distribution of culture required—indeed enforced—a more passive form of consumption. A division emerged between culture producers and culture consumers. Viewed in this historical light, the explosive growth in user-generated content is less a new phenomenon than a sign that the im- pulse to interact meaningfully with our media—to participate in its creation—never went away. The Internet—the very architecture of which enforces decentralization— created a natural stage for a participatory approach to media production and consumption. Indeed, the booming genre of online “fan fiction,” in which readers craft new plotlines to everything from Star Trek to Harry Potter, is just a modern manifestation of the ancient, oral tradition of storytelling, in which each teller reinterprets the story.

Long before the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1994, the Internet took the form of a many-to-many communication vehicle, first through e-mail and then through Usenet groups, which were simple, all-text fore- runners of the sorts of discussion forums one can find on nearly any community website or in a venue like Yahoo groups. Naturally, the first people to use the Web were those already familiar with the Internet, so early web- sites followed a similar model, which again prized the contributions—even if these consisted, as they do today, of mostly overheated opinions—of the individual. On the Internet, the least-visited blogs and the largest corporate marketing site occupy the same cultural real estate: both are just one click away.

More than just an effective cost-cutting strategy, crowdsourcing holds the potential to spawn for an economy in which we aren’t all forced into predetermined categories, where boys with high math scores aren’t routed toward engineering schools and girls with fanciful approaches to their science projects aren’t cheerfully encouraged to focus on the humanities. In the summer of 2006 I spent a few days wandering around the moveable punk-rock feast known as the Warped Tour. This is no mere subculture; the Warped Tour is attended by close to a million people each year. Above and beyond being a showcase for scores of mostly unknown rock bands, the Warped Tour provides space for a bustling cultural commerce that operates out of kiosks and tents constructed around the fringes of the stages themselves. I’m not sure any experience before or since has given me quite as much faith in the future of mankind. Many of the musicians here also wrote books of poetry, or ran little tattoo parlors, or operated websites. The point is that these kids didn’t feel a need to describe themselves as a practitioner of one craft as opposed to another. They made stuff be- cause it turned them on. Those kids have a message for all the lawyers who like to paint and the painters who like to conduct backyard bird counts and the computer programmers who like to teach and the teachers who like to program: The future has a place for you. In the future, we will all be dilettantes.

Chapter 7-What the Crowd Knows: Collective Intelligence in Action, Cont.

Amsterdam: Wow. The Dutch know their crowdsourcing. I spoke yesterday to an audience of 350. I wanted to know who I was dealing with. I'm pretty accustomed to speaking to people who've never even heard of the term before. "Who's heard of Threadless.com?" I ask. Almost every hand goes up. That's okay, I figure, Threadless is an international sensation at this point. "Who's heard of InnoCentive?" Now I've got them. Outside of the sciences, almost no one I talk to has heard of InnoCentive. Two hundred hands shoot up. I was impressed, and a little intimidated. That said, the program was a smash, from my perspective anyway. The audience asked detailed, provocative questions and my hosts were gracious, witty and incredibly generous, treating me to a dinner both wonderful and wonderfully leisurely, in the proper European manner. But now I'm back, and so, I hope, are you. Below please find the continuation of Chapter Seven:

Marketocracy: Collective Intelligence Improvised

Think of TJ White as the argument for diversity, personified. In 1999 not many investors would have picked White as a candidate to manage their portfolios. Up to that point White had spent his life accumulating a lot of experience doing very little. He was an unremarkable student at his Midland, Texas high school. He signed up for an unremarkable six-year stint in the US Navy, followed by another six-year stint in Colorado pursuing what he calls his “second childhood,” working a series of jobs meant only to “support a lifestyle” that revolved around skiing and gold prospecting. He excelled at neither. One morning late that year White woke up, looked out at the parking lot outside his one-bedroom apartment and had a moment of clarity. “I was a loser. I was 30, and I had nothing. No skills, no college, no career.”

A few days after New Year’s Day 2000 White moved to Dallas, and the puzzle pieces started falling into place. He quickly found a job at a Home Depot not far from his house. “The manager was ex-Navy, and we hit it off,” White recalls. A few weeks after that he met the woman who would become his wife, at a get together of the Tall Texans of Dallas. “I stumbled across the Website when I first moved to Dallas,” explains White. “I’m six-foot-two, and Cheri’s six-foot-two. We got serious pretty quickly.”

Chapter 7-What the Crowd Knows: Collective Intelligence in Action, Cont.

I'm in a mad dash for the airport. Palo Alto speaking gig today, then Amsterdam tomorrow, then all the way back to LA next week. This would all be terribly thrilling if I was 27. At 37 it's exhausting. Still fun. But exhausting.

Great comments from the peanut gallery, including a few deserved dressing down (How do I expect to elicit comments when I don't respond to them. I'd blame kids and book, but believe I may have played that card too often already.) At any rate, here's the continuation of Chapter Seven.

Investing in the Future—Prediction Markets

In 1988 the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson shocked the nation by winning the Democratic primary race in Michigan, an outcome that neither polls nor political insiders had anticipated. At the University of Iowa, a handful of political scientists and economists had a very pragmatic reaction to the failure of the polls to predict Jackson’s victory: They decided to build a better system for predictions. Over the course of the next several months, and well in time for the general election between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, they created the Iowa Political Stock Market. Investors could buy up to $500 in securities that paid out according to the share of the popular vote each candidate received. Shares were priced between $0.00 and $1.00, and were paid out in full. If you snatched up Bush shares when they were running at 55 cents, you’d have made 45 cents for every share you purchased.

By November the results came in. The average error among all the major exit polls in the general presidential election that year was 2.5 percent. Not bad. But the Iowa Political Stock Market did much, much better, predicting the outcome to within one-tenth of a percent. “While the laws of statistic govern opinion polls,” said Robert Forsythe, one of the market’s creators, “the invisible hand of Adam Smith makes political markets work .”