Crowdsourcing: Curating by Flickr

Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:
The White Paper Version: 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 Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

October 18, 2006

Curating by Flickr

Digg this: A really impressive lightbox photography show at the Atlantic Ave. Subway Station in Brooklyn. The curator discovered the artist – the game developer and photographer Ranjit Bhatnagar – by searching Flickr. That represents a significant departure from curation-as-usual, which generally involves selecting known quantities from a pool of established artists. (I spent a year curating for a New York gallery in the '90s.) Call it disintermediation, or call it luck (as do the folks at Flickr blog); I'll call it crowdsourcing, and a sign of things to come. Tip of my hat to the ever-resourceful Sharon McIntyre for sending me the story.

Posted at 03:25 PM in Decline of the Sole Auteur | Permalink