There are many are great working examples of crowdsourcing. According to Jeff Howe, a leader in the area of crowdsourcing and author of Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business his white paper definition of crowdsourcing states:
“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”
The emergence of collaborative production “crowdsourcing” or “open invitation” covers a wide range of practices that businesses are now using. The following, are just a few examples covering the use of crowdsourcing in the areas of investigative journalism, business, and government.
Washington Watch Blog: For years now, earmarking has been conducted behind the scenes, but the House and Senate recently required their membership to reveal earmark requests. The Washington Watch Blog is encouraging users to submit earmarks from their hometown member of Congress or Senator, yes with a Kindle going to the person who enters the most earmarks.They have already compiled an impressive array of data.
Guardian: Crowdsourcing data. The Guardian investigative campaign used crowdsourcing to aid in the review of thousands of documents looking into MP’s expenses. Using a very simple front end application The Guardian opened up the books allowing readers to identify individual claims, or documents that merit further investigation. According to the Guardian, they have 458,832 pages of documents. 23,217 of which have been reviewed through use of crowdsourcing.
It’s debatable whether or not the two commercial examples listed below are straight up contests, or as I believe, working examples of structured crowdsourcing.
Netflix: One of the best and most widely publicized examples of commercial crowdsourcing is Netflix. Developers and engineers were challenged to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. There are a number of articles covering this initiative from The New York Times, including a video interview with developers, to TechCrunch and Mashable.
Dew Labs Challenge: Recently, Mountain Dew launched a new contest, a crowdsourcing and marketing campaign called Dew Labs Challenge. After uploading or emailing a short video about why you deserve one of 50 limited-edition DEW lab kits, the winners will be determined and must choose three flavors, one of which will become the next permanent flavor in the DEW lineup. Using a few charismatic online personalities to promote the contest, including social media and TV personality Shira Lazar, and independent filmmaker (and popular Twitter personality) Jason Pollock, Mountain Dew hopes to build on their successful 2008 DEWmocracy campaign by using crowdsourcing to drive the selection of the next Mountain Dew flavor.
O’Reilly Media: A great proposal from Carl Malamud| @CarlMalamud. The FCC collects broadband deployment statistics from industry, But, according to Malamud the statistics are misleading. “If one site in a zip code has broadband, the whole area is considered high-speed.” So how does this help the FCC? It doesn’t. Malamud proposes the following solution.
First is basic survey science. Put a form up that allows people to enter their address, and answer questions: Is DSL available? Do you have it? Do you have cable Internet? Etc… In addition to a form on the FCC web site, an API would be great so people could develop their own apps for entering data from volunteer census workers on the streets.
Second is basic network research. Develop an API that allows an application to enter information such as Wi-Fi signal strength at a given location, cell carrier signal strength, and how many Wi-Fi networks are seen. Then, encourage people to develop iPhone, Android, and other applications to collect the data.
Both proposals require public buy in. A hard sell, but this data is not exactly private to begin with.
I’m interesting in both successful and unsuccessful use-case examples of crowdsourcing to include in this on-going weekly series. Submissions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Related Links: Croudsourcing, A Talk From Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing Music: Sour’s ‘Hibi no Neiro.
