Crowdsourcing

Chapter Two: The Rise of the Amateur

What better place to start than at the beginning? As my regular readers know, my publisher, Crown, and I have decided to publish reader comments on some selected material from my upcoming Crowdsourcing Book. Here's a snippet from last week's post with additional details:

My publisher—Crown Books—has given me the official green light to excerpt some choice selections from my book for your critical review. The most salient, witty or astute remarks will be published as an appendix in the final chapter of the book. I was inspired, in part, by what Clive Thompson did in his Wiredmag piece on Radical Transparency last April. He blogged the article before it was published, and ran the best comments he received in the margins. I was pretty impressed—but hardly surprised—by the thoughtfulness of the comments. The resulting piece created more of a dialogue than the monologue in which magazine writers generally traffic. The mechanics of storytelling, and the exigencies of print publishing, require that we smooth the corners—reduce complexities and nuances. What Clive did, and what I hope to do as well, is bring those sharp corners, the paradoxes and contradictions and exceptions, back into the final product.

In other words, I'm soliciting constructive criticism. For the most part, I'll be excerpting the more analytical, expository bits. The places in which I make arguments to which some, perhaps many, will take exception. At least I hope that's the case. Today's a bit more of a lark: A story.

But first some background. Chapter 1, an Introduction, essentially takes the reader through the basic concept of crowdsourcing and participatory culture, and lays out the structure of the book. Here's this from the Intro:

The book is laid out into three sections, each roughly corresponding to themes of past, present and future. The purpose of the first section of the book is to show how four seemingly unrelated developments created conditions that made a new form of economic production not only possible but inevitable. Chapter Two will focus on how the dramatic rise in education levels coupled with increased leisure time and increased access to the Internet to create a culture of amateurism. Chapter Three will show how the open source software movement provided an intellectual framework, ideology and practical model for crowdsourcing. Chapter Four will examine how the tools of production in fields ranging from architecture to design to science and photography became accessible to the masses. Then chapter four will look at how the Internet gathered these once isolated individuals into communities that self-organize into workforces capable of efficiently allocating tasks to the appropriate members of the community.

That should prime the pump for your reading. After the jump find the start of Chapter 2: The Rise of the Amateur.

Get Published (in my book)

I've been trying to crack one particular nut for the past year. How do I involve the crowd in my own book? This poses a bit of a predicament as I'm frankly a bit more skeptical about the crowd's ability to create a book than I am their ability to create code, T-Shirts or movies. While my subject matter may be squarely new school, I'm a bit of the old school in my writing habits. I write for a magazine, fer crissakes! That's published on dead trees! That is distributed by carbon-spewing trucks! As such, I've spent much of the year holed up in my afore-photographed florescent cave scribbling, scribbling, scribbling away. No more!

My publisher—Crown Books—has given me the official green light to excerpt some choice selections from my book for your critical review. The most salient, witty or astute remarks will be published as an appendix in the final chapter of the book. I was inspired, in part, by what Clive Thompson did in his Wiredmag piece on Radical Transparency last April. He blogged the article before it was published, and ran the best comments he received in the margins. I was pretty impressed—but hardly surprised—by the thoughtfulness of the comments. The resulting piece created more of a dialogue than the monologue in which magazine writers generally traffic. The fact is, the act of publishing to a large audience requires donning a cloak of authority that I, at least, rarely feel comfortable in. At Wired, we all do our very best to honestly and thoroughly convey the many facets, the many, many truths and perspectives, that make up even the most black-and-white seeming stories. But the mechanics of storytelling, and the exigencies of print publishing, require that we smooth the corners—reduce complexities and nuances. What Clive did, and what I hope to do as well, is bring those sharp corners, the paradoxes and contradictions and exceptions, back into the final product.

So have at it. I'll put up the First Installment early next week.

Awesome! You F***in' Made That!

You all knew I'd have to crowdsource some element of a book on crowdsourcing, right? A few weeks ago my British publisher, Random House UK launched a "coversourcing" campaign which, if you didn't guess from the name, involves crowdsourcing the design for the dust jacket of the British edition of the book. It's pretty standard-issue crowdsourcing: The crowd submits the designs and votes on their favorites. It's already generating some awfully nifty covers, and I couldn't be happier to see my ideas given such wonderful visual treatment, as the title of my post—a riff on the Beastie Boys' crowdsourced concert film, Awesome! I F***ing Shot That!—surely makes clear.

I'm declining to endorse a candidate for the time being, but here's an example of the level of quality design coming in:

(Above: "Crowdsourcing" Cover Design, by hello.vickibrown)

Here are some details on the contest:

Design submissions will be welcomed until midnight GMT 10th February 2008. Following this period we will invite users to vote for their favourite Crowdsourcing designs between 11th – 25th February to create a shortlist of the 20 most popular designs. These will then be put to a panel vote from which the winning entrant will be chosen and crowned winner of the Coversourcing competition. The winner will be announced on 3rd March.

And here's the creative brief:

We are seeking a striking, iconic book jacket design which should engage on the strength of its concept and composition rather than rely on finishes and production values. The cover design should be bold, dynamic and eye-catching and should sit as comfortably on shelves at your local high street book shop as it would as a thumbnail image on Amazon. We’d love it if the chosen jacket was a collaboration - a true expression of the power of crowdsourcing. So if you want to collaborate with other artists & designers - illustrators, photographers, typographers - we heartily recommend it.

For more on creative direction and rules, go here.

I'd initially suggested Random House UK allow the crowd to pick the ultimate winner, but I understand the reasoning behind having a jury. Frankly, it's remarkable that a big publishing house would relinquish as much control over so crucial an element as cover design. Kudos to Adam Humphrey and his team in Random House's marketing department for putting together such a innovative promotion.

It is, as far as we can tell, one of the only times book cover design has been tossed out to the crowd. Guy Kawasaki—a guy who got more done yesterday than we did all year— conducted a similar campaign for his book The Art of the Start. If the final results are half as good as Guy's, I'll be stoked.

A Beautiful Day (Under the Florescent Lights)

I have reached a milestone of sorts in the writing of the crowdsourcing book. A few hours ago I turned in the last real chapter of the book (I still need to write an appendix), and am moving on to editing the existing manuscript. I have a publication date now. It's July 8 of this year.

The bad news is: I only have a few more months in which to revise the book. The good news is: I only have a few more months in which to revise the book. I kid—sort of. I'm very happy with what's on the page, but still have an enormous amount of work to do. Being a fussy writer type, I'd gladly revise and re-revise the book for another year if they'd let me. And while I'll be happy to finish the work, it'll be a bittersweet moment. Though the last year has been arduous (Having a second kid during the final sprint didn't make it easier), it's also been illuminating—in more ways than I can count—and, weird as it sounds, a whole lot of fun.

As you'll see in the coming weeks, we have big plans for this blog. On the edit side (excuse the antiquated MSM terms), I'll be crowdsourcing the revision process by posting some select excerpts of the book. I fully hope you'll mince no words and spare no criticism in reviewing those sections. On the business side, I'll be formalizing my relationship to Wired.com by joining their incipient blog network. This won't mean much to you, except that there will be more ads on the site. But there are variations on how many ads I run, and what placement I give them. I get a cut of the revenues, but in the spirit of community—an ethos I've come to greatly respect this year—I'm planning on giving it to a charity of our choice. I like Doctors Without Borders, but I'm open to suggestions and, ultimately, a vote. At any rate, expect to see (okay read), much more of me in the coming months.

For those of you interested in how the sausage is made, here are some pics:

(Above: The manuscript: 250-plus pages of uncorrected grammatical mistakes and sentence run-ons.)

(above: Is it raining? Snowing? Spring? Fall? In my windowless cube, weather doesn't exist.)

(above: When I started work on the book a friend told me to buy magazine holders for each chapter in the book. Best. Advice. Ever.)