Crowdsourcing

A Million Doubts ...

When Penguin Books, the venerable British publishing house, announced it would launch an experiment in wikifiction, I felt no need to document, or comment on, the fact. Frankly, I'm still skeptical that the same attribute that makes a million individuals working together so powerful (namely, our differences in experience, outlook, beliefs, etc.) would make projects of this kind a sort of exercise in tortured futility. A lot of labor and trial and error and—wikis being wikis—conflict for naught. But then I read this post by Jon Elek, one of the Penguin editors working on the, um, novel. He was winning, humble and—most of all—game. Just the prerequisites for any open source project manager. He admits his own considerable doubts, and then the reasons he cast them aside. Taking a page from him, I took my own stroll through the twisting, byzantine byways of the million-authored novel and found it, not only not torturous but even fun, in an odd, Postmodern way. Like John notes, I couldn't do it for much more than ten minutes, but that doesn't mean it's not great spectator sport. May the game go on ... at least until the vandals render the novel utterly unreadable.

The Prolific Crowd

Another Book-by-Wiki: Sometime next year Pearson Education will publish a collectively authored book, We Are Smarter Than Me. This easily qualifies as the most ambitious entry into the crowdwriting arena. The eponymous organization behind the book is inviting 2 million people from several prestigious institutions to contribute (675,000 invitees from Wharton alone, which presumably constitutes everyone who's ever enrolled in a class there), and will be using the "latest technologies" to make every aspect of the process transparent and collaborative, landing WASTM in that sweet spot where the Venn circles of crowdsourcing and peer production overlap. I find their optimism admirable, and hope it's not misplaced. Other crowd-authoring attempts rely on some higher authority to select the best bits for popular delectation. As I read it, the We Are Smarter Than Me founders expect the crowd alone to perform that role. Granted, this happens to be a pretty rarefied crowd, but then, the smarter the cats, the harder they are to herd. Thomas Malone, an MIT management prof and one of the organizers of the project says that "No matter what it's going to be interesting." I couldn't agree more. My only question: If all the content's being authored by the crowd, will someone please edit that title?

Curating by Flickr

Digg this: A really impressive lightbox photography show at the Atlantic Ave. Subway Station in Brooklyn. The curator discovered the artist – the game developer and photographer Ranjit Bhatnagar – by searching Flickr. That represents a significant departure from curation-as-usual, which generally involves selecting known quantities from a pool of established artists. (I spent a year curating for a New York gallery in the '90s.) Call it disintermediation, or call it luck (as do the folks at Flickr blog); I'll call it crowdsourcing, and a sign of things to come. Tip of my hat to the ever-resourceful Sharon McIntyre for sending me the story.

Diversity of the Crowd: Part II

• Crowd as Author: The folks at Lifebushido have just published a collectively authored book, entitled Why Are You Here Right Now? The book includes 1,000 answers to just that question, all submitted via Mechanical Turk. This is somewhat reminiscent of The Sheep Market, which also capitalized on teh eagerness of Turkers to do anything for a fistful of pennies. The jury is still out on whether consumers find this kind of group authorship to be compelling content. The Swedish consulting firm Interesting.org – which uses a community of 30,000 to generate ideas for their clients – recently published a book authored by 50 of their members, with another collaborative book in the works. Teo Hausen at interesting.org tells me it's sold well. It's only available in Sweden, so I have no idea of confirming this. Finally, in 2007 the artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher will publish a book featuring works contributed to their Web site Learningtoloveyoumore.com.

Some will point out that these are essentially just anthologies – hardly an experimental genre of literature. True enough, but I think there's something more interesting at play in the broadly participatory nature of these projects, which strive to represent the crowd in its very diversity, as opposed to representing a spcialized attribute through a select group of authors. At any rate all three books signify a new approach to the oldest medium and I'll be anxious to see how they fare.

Creativity of the Crowd

I always figured the categories of my posts would emerge over time, and so they have. As I betrayed nearly a month ago in my post on TheSheepMarket.com, I originally did not believe that crowdsourcing models would be employed in most of the arts. A reference work sure, but a novel? To put a fine point on it, it made sense to me that a TV show composed of shorts created by individuals within the crowd would come to market (and be embraced by it), but I was far more skeptical that a pure peer production model could ever create works traditionally the province of the sole auteur. That skepticism took another blow this past week, as I learned of not one but five separate examples of artists using the crowd to develop their work.

First this, from the New Statesman, which points out that the upcoming Samuel L. Jackson joint, Snakes on a Plane, was reshot according to fan chatter on the Internet boards, and that an upcoming British feature will go even further, offering creative input to the first 1,000 individuals to invest in the movie.

Next up, last week Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing wrote that Sci Fi author Brandon Sanderson was posting the chapters of a book currently in the works to his Web site in order to collect suggestions and editorial advice from his fans. Of course, it's only crowdsourcing to the extent that he employs those suggestions, so let's call this a beta run. Or one of two, as it turns out that fellow author Chris Roberson is doing something similar on his Web site.

Finally, a fascinating article in the NY Times from onetime Wired writer Warren St. John about Ze Frank, an online performance artist who has set up a wiki page on which his fans (and detractors) can suggest jokes, edit them, etc. Again, the jury's still out, but I couldn't be more excited for the verdict.