Crowdsourcing - Part 1 (Background)

(This is part 1 of the notes to my presentation on crowdsourcing for my iSchool class, INFX 598.)

Crowdsourcing is producing results by harnessing the efforts of a large number of people, usually members of the public, and usually using Internet technology. With crowdsourcing, large jobs are cut down to size so that many people working together can achieve more than a single person could do alone.

Effective crowdsourcing doesn’t happen by accident, and it generally doesn’t arise organically. The key to effective crowdsourcing is in engineering the means of collecting, funneling, orchestrating, and processing a collective input into a useful output. Usually those who use crowdsourcing apply expertise to break a large job up intelligently, and then build a system that many people can use easily to provide a part of the answer, as well as a system to interpret, collate, or otherwise construct the desired larger project or result out of all the small parts.

One of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing may be The Oxford English Dictionary. In July 1857 a circular was issued by the ‘Unregistered Words Committee’ of the Philological Society of London. This circular, which was reprinted in various journals, asked for volunteers to read particular books and copy out quotations illustrating ‘unregistered’ words and meanings—items not recorded in other dictionaries—that could be included in a proposed dictionary supplement. Quotations began to pour in from volunteers, and in January 1858 the Philological Society decided that, instead, efforts should be directed toward compiling a completely new dictionary Renewed appeals to the public followed later that year, culminating in a formal ‘Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary’. The OED still releases “Appeals” to the public to solicit dictionary input on current word usage.

Modern crowdsourcing takes many forms, and new forms are being devised every day – as I researched this presentation, I kept finding new topics to include! So this presentation is not comprehensive by any means, but I hope it will give you an idea of some of the ways the crowdsourcing model is being used.

Before moving ahead, though, I’d like to clarify a few terms that will help me discuss crowdsourcing. First, many people apply the term “crowdsourcing” to projects that offer prizes or other incentives to the public for solving a specific problem. One early example is the cash prize offered by the French military in 1795 for a new method to preserve food, which spurred Nicolas Appert to invent modern canning techniques. A modern version is the Ansari X Prize, which was offered to induce a non-government organization to develop a reusable commercially-viable manned spacecraft. In the strictest sense, however, this is not so much crowdsourcing as what Karim R. Lakhani of Harvard Business School calls “broadcast search”: soliciting a solution from an as-yet unknown individual by widely publicizing a motivational reward. It’s asking a broad audience for a solution, but not using the collective power of many individuals to produce that solution.

I’d also like to define “explicit” and “implicit” crowdsourcing. Explicit crowdsourcing describes projects where people knowingly and actively participate in a project, while implicit crowdsourcing harnesses users who are doing a different activity and don’t necessarily know what work they may be doing for third parties who need information they provide. Examples of each of these will be coming up.

I’ve coined two terms to describe types of crowdsourced project, “mosaic” and “encyclopedia” types. In a mosaic-type project, participants do small tasks that aren’t very useful one by one, but that can be patched together into a cohesive large work. In an encyclopedia-type project, participants contribute small pieces of work that may be useful on their own, but are combined into a larger work that resembles an anthology or an encyclopedia. Again, examples will be upcoming.

Finally, for future reference, I’ll be publishing my notes for this presentation as a series of blog posts on my blog, Fish Who Answer the Telephone. (As you can now see if you're reading this!)  I’ve also collected links to all the projects I discuss in a Tumblr, and I’ve started a Scoop.It page with more articles about crowdsourcing, if you want to read even more about it. 

(Next: research and information projects benefit from crowdsourcing!)

Calling Technorati

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Pardon me, the rest of you, but Technorati is looking for a claim code in my feed, so that was it. It was not a finger spasm, nor someone taking down a gagging fit in dictation.

Thank you for your indulgence.

Good advice from Chuck P

Here's a column containing some excellent advice from author Chuck Palahniuk. His words are geared toward writers, but there's good food for thought here for any creative type.

13 WRITING TIPS

by Chuck Palahniuk

Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry's store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point. Each of the hundreds of different objects was priced with a faded circle of red cardboard. And walking past, my friend, Laurie, took a long look and said, "Their window-dressing philosophy must be: 'If the window doesn't look quite right - put more in'."

She said the perfect comment at the perfect moment, and I remember it two decades later because it made me laugh. Those other, pretty display windows… I'm sure they were stylist and tasteful, but I have no real memory of how they looked.

For this essay, my goal is to put more in. To put together a kind-of Christmas stocking of ideas, with the hope that something will be useful. Or like packing the gift boxes for readers, putting in candy and a squirrel and a book and some toys and a necklace, I'm hoping that enough variety will guarantee that something here will occur as completely asinine, but something else might be perfect.

Number One: Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my "egg timer method" of writing. You never saw that essay, but here's the method: When you don't want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings. If you still hate writing, you're free in an hour. But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you'll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you'll keep going. Instead of an egg timer, you can put a load of clothes in the washer or dryer and use them to time your work. Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story… clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.

Number Two: Your audience is smarter than you imagine. Don't be afraid to experiment with story forms and time shifts. My personal theory is that younger readers distain most books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter. Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling. And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.

Number Three: Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene. What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off? What will it set up for later scenes? How will this scene further your plot? As you work, drive, exercise, hold only this question in your mind. Take a few notes as you have ideas. And only when you've decided on the bones of the scene - then, sit and write it. Don't go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind. And don't make your reader slog through a scene in which little or nothing happens.

Number Four: Surprise yourself. If you can bring the story - or let it bring you - to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader. The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.

Number Five: When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as "buried guns." At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building. But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives. That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect "buried gun" to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.

Number Six: Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week - even if you call that party a "workshop." Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing. Even if someday you sell your work, no amount of money will compensate you for your time spent alone. So, take your "paycheck" up front, make writing an excuse to be around people. When you reach the end of your life - trust me, you won't look back and savor the moments you spent alone.

Number Seven: Let yourself be with Not Knowing. This bit of advice comes through a hundred famous people, through Tom Spanbauer to me and now, you. The longer you can allow a story to take shape, the better that final shape will be. Don't rush or force the ending of a story or book. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes. You don't have to know every moment up to the end, in fact, if you do it'll be boring as hell to execute.

Number Eight: If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names. Characters aren't real, and they aren't you. By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character. Or worse, delete a character, if that's what the story really needs.

Number Nine: There are three types of speech - I don't know if this is TRUE, but I heard it in a seminar and it made sense. The three types are: Descriptive, Instructive, and Expressive. Descriptive: "The sun rose high…" Instructive: "Walk, don't run…" Expressive: "Ouch!" Most fiction writers will only use one - at most, two - of these forms. So use all three. Mix them up. It's how people talk.

Number Ten: Write the book you want to read.

Number Eleven: Get author book jacket photos taken now, while you're young. And get the negatives and copyright on those photos.

Number Twelve: Write about the issues that really upset you. Those are the only things worth writing about. In his course, called "Dangerous Writing," Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment. There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember: the art of "manumission," which I can't spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story. And "sous conversation," which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story. Because I'm not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom's agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches. The working title is "A Hole In The Heart," and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.

Number Thirteen: Another Christmas window story. Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.

The painter's hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he'd stop to drink something out of a paper cup.

Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad.

This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white "snow," first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.

A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, "That's so neat. I wish I could do that…"

And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I'm not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn't there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He'd disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.

(Reposted from here.)

Please allow me to introduce myself....

Wealth? Hardly. Taste? Well, perhaps. Certainly a healthy (albeit skeptical) curiosity and a sense of humor, I hope.

I'm Marty Hale-Evans, a writer, editor, artist who doesn't art as much as she'd like, and graduate student in Library and Information Science at the University of Washington School of Information. (The iSchool is my school!) I'm the co-author of Mindhacker and a contributing author/editor of Mind Performance Hacks. I'm a voracious reader, unrepentant thinker, and compulsive discusser. I've been online since about 1985, and have been very involved with social media since before there was a term for it; this may be what I end up doing when I finish my MLIS, but I haven't quite decided yet. In other news, I love dogs (and have two of them), tabletop games, comedy, culinary experimentation, mid-century design, color theory, pop music (usually vintage), good coffee, information for its own sake (there's no such thing as trivia), and words used well.

In this space, I expect to be talking about some of the same ground as we touched in the books: thinking, communication, technology, creativity, media. However, this is my "book," so I expect my own opinions will be more to the fore, and I reserve the right to explore tangents.

And what about those fish, you may ask? Well...it came to my attention some years ago that Fish Who Answer the Telephone was the title of an old book, and although I've never read it, it became something like a koan for me to imagine it. What were these fish like? How on earth did they do it? Who set out to put them in such a position, and why? Why would someone want to call them, and what would motivate them to answer? For that matter, how would they answer, and in what language? It's provided me with no end of imagination fodder, and now it seems like a good metaphor for we who approach technology and communication channels that seem ever newer and more alien, with motivations and expressions that may seem idiosyncratic and hard for anyone else to understand, yet with the intention to make that strange connection to the world. Somehow the image has ended up more powerful than the sum of its parts, and I hope my explorations here will prove the same, and as curiously delightful to whomever may be looking in.