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.

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Psssst... You spelled Mu's name wrong ;)

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