Crowdsourcing

Assignment Zero: The Interviews

Several weeks ago Assignment Zero executive editor Jay Rosen said that only about 28 percent of what we tried to do with Assignment Zero worked. (If you're unfamiliar with the AZ project, go here.) Rosen had been discussing the future of the interview with Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, and while 28 percent's a pretty stark assessment, it's probably accurate. Let's just say there's a lot we know now we didn't know when we launched the project. In a few weeks I'll be publishing an essay on Wired.com that will try to explore what  I've started to call "a wonderful failure."

But right now I want to celebrate everything that went right. About ten minutes ago I finished reading all 80 of the interviews conducted for the project. To properly appreciate this book-length body of work, I had to relinquish my expectation that they would hew to the putative subject, crowdsourcing. At first I was disappointed. Clearly Assignment Zero had suffered a case of mission creep. So I decided to revise my expectations. The general theme could be considered to be "emerging systems of collaborative production on the Internet." Mindset adjusted, I came away highly satisfied. Here's why:

With shockingly few exceptions, the interviews are compelling, thought-provoking and chock full of insights both philosophical and practical. The final package represents, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge base on the various ways the Internet has given rise to collaborative forms of production. I've been researching these issues for 18 months, and the collected information handily exceeds my own knowledge base—that itself is a testament to the wisdom of the crowds over the wisdom of the expert.

But allow me to gush in more detail: Most of the interviewers had obviously conducted a fair amount of research into their subject and prepared a list of appropriate questions to ask. AZ contributor Randy Burge, for instance, clearly drew deeply from the available literature on crowdsourced innovation before interviewing Innocentive co-founder Alpheus Bingham. The product is the finest distillation of the complex process by which Innocentive crowdsources problems in corporate R&D to its network of 120,000 scientists. In many cases, the interviewer was uniquely qualified to conduct the interview. James Surowiecki, for instance, was interviewed by one of his former editors.

This is the beauty of open organizational systems. People self-select, assigning themselves to tasks for which they are best-suited. Contrast this with the process by which an interviewer is assigned to interviewee in a closed system (a magazine or newspaper). A journalist is often chosen to conduct a Q&A with a subject based on his or her availability. That's a pretty poor qualification, though it's borne of simple necessity. The professional in this closed system (and I speak from personal experience), often lacks the time it takes to adequately acquaint oneself with the subject's work, ideas and experience. If the resulting product feels a little rote and indifferent, do you blame the journalist or the system?

But not only did the interviews betray a level of passion and specialization rarely found in the mainstream media, they were simply better reads. Magazines and newspapers tend to pasteurize such interviews to filter out any content that any reader anywhere might possibly deem offensive or obscure or simply irrelevant. The result is something that's leached of idiosyncrasy, complex ideas and the accidental poetry that arises from an animated conversation. The AZ interviews, lightly edited as they are, retain all these qualities (along with lots of typos and a few bits of asinine commentary.)

Over the next few months I plan on featuring several of the interviews on the blog as I'd like to directly engage many of the ideas—and their authors—on this blog. Until then ...

Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur

Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur, hits bookstores today. Keen has given us a brickbat of a polemic, which is to say, it's blunt, mean and not very sophisticated. Think of his argument as: Everything On or  Transmitted Over or Affected By the Internet is Bad For You. His actual subtitle is "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture." Same thing. For those of us with stock in the belief that the Internet has liberated a great deal of latent creativity, ideas and dare I say it, beauty, it's an offensive notion.

It is also, to hear Keen's critics, a disingenuous one. Prominent voices like Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have all cast Keen in the role of a calculating and—worse, this—sophomoric provocateur, producing arguments that aren't worth a "thoughtful response," in Winer's words, because they are "beneath criticism." (Rather than offer a round-up of the various leading lights who've taken the whip hand to Keen, I'll hand you over to Dan Farber at ZDNet, who does an admirable job of it.)

As everyone seems to have their basic talking points down—Keen's not just wrong, he's terrible at being wrong—the only real debate in play is whether to engage Keen at all. The consensus is that Keen is a troll, and the only way to deal with trolls is ignore them. I can't say I agree. I read Keen's book when I first received a review copy back in February, and had a similar reaction as many others. One, thank god someone's finally poking a stick in the Web 2.0 happy hive; and Two, why does the welcome antagonist have to wield such a clumsy, ineffective tool?

I talked to my immediate editors at Wired about the book anyway. We agreed that the book was likely to get tons of press, and that you go to the ring with the opponent you have, not the opponent you want. I spent several, long hours battling Keen—whose not without personal charm and wit—and found him as exasperating as his book. For what it's worth, I believe Keen is in earnest, not merely out to make a buck. (Which isn't to say the two motives are mutually exclusive.)

In the end the decision was made not to run the piece. I have decided to run the interview on Crowdsourcing.com. Because while we all might know Keen is a troll, the London Times, Forbes, the Financial Times and some 45 other publications don't. According to the Nexis news database, they all gave Keen coverage in the last several months. The scientific community decided that Intelligent Design was beneath criticism too, and we know how well that went.

The fact is, Keen's arguments will sound mightily persuasive to a significant constituency who do believe the Internet is primarily a repository of porn, spam and corrosive amateurism. Failing to recognize that the choir  to which Keen preaches might just be larger than our own congregation is an arrogant, and potentially irreversible blunder. While Web 2.0 insiders might love to hate Keen, many in the world at large will love to love him. I should note that I'm not the only dissenter on this count. Clay Shirky wages a more eloquent version of my argument here.

As such, in the spirit that all debate is good debate, I'm publishing the Wired Q&A after the jump. We kept the truly vitriolic bits out, so excuse me if it reads a bit more courtly than what I've written above. If vitriol is what you're looking for though, tomorrow I'll be moderating a debate between Keen and Time writer Lev Grossman at the Strand in New York. If you happen to live in the city or be in town for a visit, I hope you can join the fray.

Digital Sharecropping: Mesh takes on Crowdsourcing

I just got back from Toronto where I appeared on a panel at the Mesh Conference. The title of the Panel was "Digital Sharecropping: Are you Exploiting Your Users." Other panelists were Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House and Simon Pulsifer, a Wikipedian responsible for 96,000 edits (and no, I didn't add an extra zero in there). Mathew Ingram, the founder of Mesh, mediated.

I'll admit I had my misgivings about attending. I'm in writing lockdown right now, and all distractions are generally unwelcome. I agreed because I respect Mathew Ingram, who writes a great column for Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, and because this promised to be a uniquely critical—and thus interesting—take on crowdsourcing.

I was not disappointed. Mathew threw some real pickles our way, and the audience asked smart, tough questions to boot. Here's a quick summary:

Mathew started by asking the panel whether crowdsourcing indeed amounted to digital sharecropping. Simon, representing the putative sharecropper, pointed out that as Wikipedia is run as a non-profit it's a bit of a moot point, but that at any rate he was repaid for his prolific contributions by esteem within his community of wikipedians. My response was two-fold: First, I think it's a straw man set-up, because exploitation implies that the exploited are somehow under coercion, and that's not the case in any crowdsourcing model I've encountered. Vietnamese children work in sweatshops because it's the only game in town. No one's forcing people to contribute to Flickr, Youtube or Digg.

But two, and somewhat paradoxically I realize, I think it's a healthy addition to the discourse on crowdsourcing, as the model does contain the potential for inequity (a safer word, perhaps, than exploitation). Crowdsourcing is in its infancy, but to employ a metaphor, the size, shape and nature of a building are determined by the foundations you lay for it. It's important that we empahsize now that crowdsourcing is a user-centric form of production. What happens when certain industries become dominated by the crowdsourcing model? (It's not hard to imagine stock photography getting to that point before the close of the decade). It's important the community producing the goods gets to have a say in how the companies are run, and the way they're compensated. To this point, Michael Sikorsky of Cambrian House pointed out that he has set up a separate entity within CH that is owned and run completely by his members (he hates the term "users.")

Some of the most interesting debate occurred once the audience chimed in. One questioned whether Flickr should have given a share of their $35 million buyout to their users.  The same could be said about Youtube, only Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had a much larger kitty ($1.65 billion) to split. Instead they gave their users this thank you video.  This is the kind of argument that makes a lot of  sense so long as you don't think about it for very long.  Yes, Flickr and Youtube are built on the content created by their user-communities. But my point, and it reflected the consensus that emerged on the panel, was that the users of these services had already reaped their reward—free use of a once valuable commodity: online storage (Flirckr) and video distribution (Youtube). I don't think anyone using Youtube ever started posting with the anticipation of getting some sort of pay-off for their efforts. Why should they expect one after the fact? If you want to stretch the definition just a little bit further, Google itself is built on crowd contributions. Where would they be without all of us poor saps blogging away for a few hundred readers (and no compensation)? But that doesn't mean I expect a check from Google every month. I'd rather they just keep building me killer, free software.

Now, my prediction—which I didn't get to discuss yesterday—is that as the crowd gets wise to the value of their contributions, they'll begin to want to see some sort of reward that's commensurate to their contributions. This might not take the form of outright financial payment. It could be a micro-slice of equity. It could be upgraded privileges on the site in question. But soon there may be enough crowdsourcing companies that they'll have to compete for user-bases. The ones that win in the inevitable shake-our could well be those that figure out a formula for making their users feel amply compensated.

Finally, what I found most interesting was Michael Sikorsky's observation that while Cambrian House offers their contributors with rewards measurable in both dollars (royalty points on the eventual income from a product developed through the CH system) and that other, increasingly important coin, reputation (CH calls them "glory points,") the latter has proven to be a far more effective way to incentivize the CH community. As Michael points out, "our members care less about money than they do about meaning. Their labor has to hold meaning for them."

That resonates with all the research I've been doing for this book. Patrick Lor, the onetime EVP at iStockPhoto came up to me after the panel and pointed out that for most iStockers, the $100 a month they make off their photographs is less valuable than what it represents: validation of their creative effort. The money still matters, but in a symbolic, not financial sense. There's still a lot we don't know about why crowdsourcing works (and why, on some occasions, it simply doesn't), but what's clear is that people are far more complexly motivated than we once imagined.