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.
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.
Psssst... You spelled Mu's name wrong ;)
Posted by: Gerard Barberi | July 16, 2008 at 01:45 PM