A recent article published in the New York Times: The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused) suggests, open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task. As a follow up to last week’s article Crowdsourcing: Investigative, Business, and Government, I have added seven more examples of crowdsourcing. Let me know your thoughts on whether or not you think the following examples are sustainable and designed with enough structure to succeed or just bad ideas for crowdsourcing projects.
- ASUS and Intel, crowdsourcing the ideal notebook at WePC.com. ASUS and Intel have created a website where users come together to share ideas, images, and inspiration about the ideal PC. Throughout the campaign, designs, feature ideas, and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and could influence the blueprint for an actual ASUS.Intel notebook PC.
- DoD Web 2.0 Guidance Forum. Soliciting public input though Open Government. The Web 2.0 Guidance Forum encourages users to comment and make suggestions to key DoD decision makers regarding usage of Web 2.0 capabilities. The task and goals of this DoD initiative are ambiguous. It will be interesting to track user engagement and the progress of the project.
- Crowdsourcing real time statistics on airport security wait times. Picking up where the US Government left off with a now defunct TSA Wait Time Calculator, FlyOnTime created a “crowdsourcing” experiment using it’s website and Twitter to create a free resource for air travelers and anyone else interested in the on-time performance of the commercial air system in the United States.
- Stimuluswatch.org. Users can advise officials on which elements of the economic recovery program are most effective in creating jobs and resuscitating our struggling economy.
- From The Chronical of Higher Education, a Duke professor uses ‘crowdsourcing’ to grade. Will this teach students how to be responsible contributors to evaluations and assessment or the wrong approach to crowdsourcing? Further, I have no factual evidence to the contrary, but it seems as though this has been tried many times before under a different name.
- Barry Judge, CEO of Best Buy recently completed a crowdsourcing campaign to get his community involved in crafting the job description and qualifications for the Senior Manager, Emerging Media Marketing position at Best Buy. Following Judge’s announcement, and the publication of the job posting, this crowdsourcing experiment seemed to work well. Will Best Buy use this method again? Do you think other companies should adapt this new crowdsourcing approach?
- Sunlight’s new project Transparency Corps is asking for help crowdsourcing the national directory of state officials on Twitter. They suport two additional crowdsourcing campaigns including earmarks asking users to review PDFs of earmark request letters that House members have submitted, and then posting the most interesting pieces on site, and an open petition pushing for the passage of H. Res. 554 – which mandates that congress must post bills 72 hours before consideration. Additional resources on site to websites like TweetCongress, and technical services like the Sunlight Labs API.
