Crowdsourced Art/Design/Development
Creative projects can also be
crowdsourced. One of the most famous crowdsourced creative communities is
Threadless. At Threadless, the public
votes on user-submitted designs; each week, a certain number of winners are
chosen for production and sale.
Designers whose work is selected receive a cash payment and credit at
the Threadless site and shop. Another example is Tongal, a site that brings
together writers, directors, talent, and production professionals to produce
video advertising projects for companies who contract a project. The community
at Tongal also participates in promoting and critiquing work.
Crowdsourced broadcasting, or
crowdcasting, is another form of crowdsourced creative work. Listener Driven Radio
is a technology that takes listener input via online or mobile applications,
analyzes song votes, comments, and other input, and automatically adjusts radio
programming in real time to suit the audience’s taste. LDR software is
currently being used by broadcasters in the USA, Canada and Europe, including
Clear Communications, CBS, and Harvard Broadcasting.
Instructables is an
encyclopedia-type project that gathers DIY projects from makers and crafters.
They submit detailed and illustrated procedures for ways to repair, repurpose,
and create an astonishing array of projects ranging from home modification to
clothing to electronics to food, and many other ingenious and original ideas
that would be hard to categorize. The Instructables community also encourages
and critiques projects, as well as offering variations and expanding on them in
commentary.
Some creative projects are
directly produced via crowdsourced information. We Feel Fine is described as
“An exploration of human emotion, in six movements.” Artists Jonathan Harris
and Sep Kamvar use automatically gathered information from blogs across the
Internet to create a dynamic, interactive visual expression of emotional
content in real time. Users can create different displays by choosing different
filters that can specify populations by area, age, and other demographic
factors.
One of the most ambitious crowdsourced creative projects is the film Life in a Day. Born out of a partnership between director Ridley Scott’s Scott Free UK and YouTube, the film is a user-generated, feature-length documentary shot on a single day—July 24, 2010. Asked to capture a moment of that day on camera, the global community responded by submitting more than 80,000 videos to YouTube. The videos contained over 4,500 hours of deeply personal, powerful moments shot by contributors from Australia to Zambia. This footage was edited and distilled into an amazing 90-minute documentary film that captures a vivid and fascinating portrait of everyday lives on Planet Earth.
Financial and Quasi-Financial Projects
One form of quasi-financial
crowdsourcing is the prediction market, also known as idea futures or event
derivatives. This type of project is based on ideas described in James
Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of
Crowds, although prediction markets pre-date the book. Essentially,
the theory is that aggregating many individual decisions under the right
circumstances can make estimates and decisions more accurately than any
individual in the group could make. Prediction markets seek to create the four
elements that are said to be required: diversity of opinion, independence (so
participants don’t know the decisions of other participants), decentralization
(so that individuals can use local resources in the decision) and aggregation.
Participants decide on issues and buy futures or make bets about what they
believe will happen, resulting in a market where ideas can be seen to rise and
fall like stocks. There are certain known types of failure to this system, but
in many cases it works very well. One of the oldest and best-known of these is
the Iowa Electronic Markets, which were introduced at the University of Iowa
during the 1988 presidential election and has often been used to predict the
results of political elections with a greater accuracy than traditional polls.
Another example is the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual market
game established in 1996 in which players buy and sell prediction shares of
movies, actors, directors, and film-related options. In 2006, it correctly
predicted 32 of the 39 big-category Oscar nominees
and 7 out of 8 top category winners.
Another financial application of
crowdsourcing is to find workers willing to do small tasks for pay; this is
also known as “microwork.” Probably the most famous source is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site. On this site, users can select from hundreds of thousands
of Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. As the name indicates, many of these
require image recognition, language processing, or other tasks that are
difficult to automate. Some require certain qualifications and pay slightly
better, but most can be done by anyone. Most tasks have a timeframe, but can be
done at the worker’s convenience, and pay a few cents each. Theoretically,
these small tasks will add up, but one criticism of this system is that it’s
often impossible to make a minimum wage doing the work, and so poses ethical
problems for hirers that can be complicated by the fact that workers in the
system are located all over the world. This model also carries concerns about
eroding expectations about job security and worker’s rights as it expands.
TaskRabbit is a crowdsourced work
source that matches people who have small jobs with local members who have had
a background check and are willing to do the job for the offered price. These
jobs include shopping, delivery, home repairs, research, pet care, and many
other types of work, which pay a market rate. Users can search jobs by type,
see normal rates and user ratings, and connect one-to-one. Some of the same
criticisms apply here, but many users seem very content with their results. EduFireis a similar site that focuses specifically on crowdsourced education, where
users can find independent tutors on a variety of subjects and contract with
them for real-time learning sessions.
Some types of crowdsourcing
produce money for a project instead of work. This may be in the form of direct
investment, loan structure, or another form of financing, but in small amounts
provided by many people. A site which provides intrinsic crowdfunding for
charities is GoodSearch; participants choose from over 100,000 schools and
non-profits, then use the GoodSearch interface to perform normal web searches.
Each time a search is performed, a small amount is donated to the chosen cause.
Powered by Yahoo!, the money comes from their advertisers.
One of the best-known microfinance
sites is Kiva, which provides a structure in which investors can lend small
amounts of money to entrepreneurs around the world. Each investor gives a small
part of the total amount needed, and intermediate managers and banks partner to
administer the loans, which the recipients agree to repay on schedule. Lenders
keep contact with the growing business by communication from the entrepreneur,
and can re-invest their money when it’s returned to them.
Crowdfunding is a way for many
individuals to network and pool their resources to support efforts initiated by
other people or organizations, usually by outright giving as opposed to
lending. Crowdfunding is used to support a wide variety of activities,
including disaster relief, art projects, small business startups, invention
development and, scientific research. Projects are usually reviewed and
approved by an organization for feasibility, then listed on a crowdfunding site
for a certain amount of time; donors can agree to give money to a project under
agreed-upon conditions, sometimes with special incentives provided by the
artist or business. Some of the most popular sites for this are Kickstarter,
RocketHub, and Indiegogo. A more specific crowdfunding site is Spot.Us, a
nonprofit platform for “community powered reporting.” Through Spot.Us, the
public can support journalists and newsrooms to Report on important and
underreported topics that may be overlooked by other news outlets. In Closing
Crowdsourcing is a huge topic,
and while there have been a lot of projects mentioned in this presentation,
it’s only a small survey of what’s happening in the field. The crowdsourcing
idea is growing and expanding into new areas and finding new applications and
forms all the time, and it’s an exciting and fascinating part of the
information world. Again, I’ve included links to all the projects mentioned in
the Tumblr, and further articles about crowdsourcing in my Scoop.It
page. Crowdsourcing is the living
proof that many of us working together can be stronger, faster, smarter, and
more creative than any one of us can ever be. It’s the face of the human race
at work.
We will live longer than I will, we will be better than I was;
We can cross rivers with our will, we can do better than I can.
-- Lykki Li
(If you have access to VoiceThread at the UW, you can see the presentation at http://voicethread.com/share/3675614/)
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