crowdsourcing

Crowd-sourcing: we are smarter than me

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

On to the second C I talk about: the wisdom of the crowds concept, and the belief that “the people formerly known as incompetent” can actually make great contributions.

I see this in organizations where everyone may not be a ‘communicator’ but there are many who can be Antennas, Filters or Connectors.

The best examples of crowd sourcing tend to be in journalism. Two great sites come to mind:

  • Oh My News – the earliest citizen journalism site that began in South Korea.
  • Spot.Us – a community-funded news site I came to discover this year and support.

However, in two other very different areas we see it in action:

  • Google used our collective results for influenza related searches and came up with the Google Flu tracker.
  • Starbucks tapped into its customer base with MyStarbiucksIdea

Bottom line: People will contribute their ideas and when they do it is up to someone in the organization to recognize it, map it, use it.

Crowdsourcing a textbook, Wikinomics experiment in the making

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

This is not the textbook approach to writing a textbook.  But then again, it’s a book on the topic of ‘Management through collaboration‘ so it would be a missed opportunity -dumb, almost– not to tap into the collaborative potential of social media.

Charles Wankel, calling himself ‘author and organizer’ describes this task as “a new authoring structure,” a 640-page book that will be “produced using an immense network of coauthors” –926 co-authors to be precise.

The web site, features a deep list of academics from all corners of the world (Botswana, Bangladesh, , Greece, India, Turkey, Slovak Republic etc)

It’s a social media experiment on a grand scale. The authors are supposed to contribute via an invitation-only wiki. They were sourced via LinkedIn. The book has an accompanying blog that for the moment, however, is not well updated. But it is indeed a demonstration of the principle of Wikinomics. The idea that mass collaboration will become the new normal, where ‘static, immovable, noneditable items will be anathema…”

Will crowdsourcing take off with Photosynth?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As an amateur photographer I have been watching this Microsoft ‘lab’ project, talking it up since last year in fact, as an example of where crowdsourcing and visual communication could be headed.

Glad to note that it’s now open to us, the hoi polloi. You will need two small plug-ins for the site to work, and adhere to a code of conduct that includes abiding by intellectual property and privacy laws.

I can see how global and local events could be seen and reported.

OlympicSynth: Imagine if Photsynth pulled all the tens of thousands of images from amateurs and Pro-Ams at the 2008 Beijing Games via Flickr and Picasa. We would get a whole new perspective and in-depth look at events such as the disqualification of an athlete for stepping over the line, the tie breaker at a gymnastics final, the Free Tibet protests, the opening ceremony etc.

ReuterSynth: Could news organizations such as local TV stations and newspapers, even global ones such as the AP and the BBC create their own synths and let communities contribute to stories? Not a stretch since some of them are taking contributions from citizen journalists.

Internal CommsSynth: Organizations could let employees feed their intranets through Photosynth widgets to participate in company events.

iPhoneSynth: The widget for an iPhone plugin is just begging to happen, considering how iPhone / iPod users are sharing pictures anyway. Camera phones and digital cameras are waiting to be knitted together.

SecuritySynths. The FBI and SIS could easily pull together real-time synths of cities and buildings, subway systems etc when something on the scale of the London bombings occurs. If you the detail of people and architectural features possible on Photosynth demos (it can capture anything from a logo on a T-shirt to a pack of cigarettes in a piazza) it makes the controversial Google Street View maps quite tame.

My Social Bookmarking project

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

In the last two weeks I have been adding Del.icio.us tags at a rapid clip for my work at ASU’s Decision Theater. The initial purpose was selfish. I read a lot, and access content at a variety of locations –a laptop at work, at the library, at home, and very often at someone else’s workstation. I have grown tired of telling people to “send me a link to that article.” Tired because people sometimes forget, which then means a lot of back and forth emails etc.

Social bookmarking solves a lot if this. The quick easy was would be for me use and encourage other communicators across our four campuses to use my delicious tag “decisiontheater” when they see something. (Yes they could use others like Newsvine, StumbleUpon, Redditt and Technorati etc.) That way it shows up when I login to Delicious from any location, and I don’t have to look up different lists of Favorites on different browsers. Reciprocally, I have been asking colleagues to tell me what tag they use, so that I too could be their eyes and ears, and create social bookmarks for their school, business unit, faculty etc.

There are other movements attempting to formalize the business of link-sharing. Publish2 is one of them. It’s mission is:

“to bring all of the world’s journalists onto one common web platform and community, one that empowers journalists to discover, organize, and rank the most important news — to benefit your own reporting, your newsroom, and all news consumers on the web.”

The project is still in beta, and it will be more than Digg or Delicious. I like the crowdsourcing flavor it brings. Which is what my mini project is all about –tapping into the wisdom of the ASU Communication crowd, so to speak.

Interesting crowdsourcing experiment on radio

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I am working on an article on citizen journalism, and came across this experiment being conducted on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC.

They’re doing a story on price gouging, and put out a call to people to “report” back on the price of three simple items at the grocery store: milk, beer and lettuce. The request went out on Sept 24th, and they have until tomorrow, Oct 4th, to file their reports in, via the web site.
They have to give the following details:

-The prices of these goods
-The neighborhood where you bought them (please give exact address, or at least the block and cross street)
-The name of the supermarket
-Any distinguishing characteristic (e.g. local bodega, high-end retailer, etc.)
-Whether or not you were surprised (yes or no)?

In a previous crowdsourced story in August, they asked listeners to report back on the number of SUVs they saw on their block. See results here. They mapped the data with pin-cushions on a Google map.

A great way to take radio into the web 2.0 era!