It's Getting Crowded
I'd like to recommend two books I've enjoyed lately. The first one, I've already mentioned here: We Are Smarter Than Me by Barry Libert and Jon Spector (and thousands of others). The second book is: Wikinomics by Don Tapsott and Anthony D. Williams. Both books show a very clear picture of where many businesses (and other areas) are heading into in the 21st Century: Crowd Sourcing. Simply put, the power of many hands can accomplish great things, that otherwise might not be accomplished. Here are two great examples to share with staff and students to help them see the power of Crowd Sourcing:
Ten Thousand Cents
This project will amaze any audience. In short, thousands of people were asked to "replicate" a small piece from a larger picture with an online drawing program, in isolation from each other and with no idea what the larger picture was (a $100 dollar bill). Each "artist" was paid a penny for their effort. Click on the image below for a larger view to see just how close they came to creating a replica of the original. According to the site, "the project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, 'crowdsourcing,' 'virtual economies,' and digital reproduction.'" Imagine asking one person to draw each of those ten-thousand pieces; that would be torture. Asking
thousands of people to do it was a "fun" and effortless exercise that could be accomplished in 1/10,000 of the time it would take one person to do it. Crowd Sourcing is "Barn Raising" brought to a whole new level.
The thing I like about this example is that you do in fact see the flaws, but all in all, there's no doubt that this artwork represents a $100 bill. It's a great visual representation of how Open Source projects probably play out: that most of the goals are quickly attained, and then further "tweaking" will need to take place to iron out the bugs. It also reminds me of what I read from Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail about Wikipedia: because of the extensive amount of entries Wikipedia holds, it is much more true than it is false. In other words, because of it's size, statistically you have a better chance of landing on accurate information than inaccurate. Is this what Stephen Colbert means by "Truthiness?"
It's interesting to see the chart at the site that shows the average time users spent from each country working on the artwork. For instance, participants from the United States on average spent only 2 minutes and 48 seconds drawing compared to participants from Egypt who spent on average 31 minutes and 54 seconds. Draw you own conclusions here.
Another site that recently caught my eye is the "Artemis Eternal" project led by Jessica Mae Stover: a short Scifi-fantasy movie that is quickly moving along in production through the power of Crowd Sourcing. Stover is getting her funding by people who share in her dream of creating a movie that is unencumbered by the six companies who control most of the media. According to the site, the project is "engineered to create a great film in the short term, and in the long term disrupt and evolve the system; ours is a story about questioning society’s expectation and what we accept as normal. What happens next depends on you." There are three levels of contribution: $1+, $25+, and $100+. Varying degrees of credit is awarded depending on the contribution. Fund raising on the Internet is nothing new, but what is groundbreaking here is that Stover and her team are creating a large budget movie from community funding and allowing anyone to witness its progression (the production timeline itself is worth taking students to). Already the project has raised $40,000 of the $100,000 needed.
Again: many small hands accomplishing something prodigious, changing the way business is done.
What are some other examples that you've seen of Crowd Sourcing?