Diversity of the Crowd: Part I

Crowdsourcing has gained velocity in both the breadth and quantity of its applications. I generally don't attempt to record all (or even most) of these, but I was so struck by the diversity of crowdsourcing efforts come to light over the last few days that I thought I'd try to round them up for the purpose of emphasizing the model's usefulness across a range of disciplines. I find this diversification greatly encouraging, both because it serves as testimony to the unbounded imagination out there, and because it supports my original supposition that crowdsourcing is a phenomenon notable for its flexibility, capable of being used to generate scientific solutions as easily as, say, monetizing user-generated video. To this end I'm launching a series of posts that will start today and run daily through next week.

• Crowd as Jury: Floyd Landis, the disgraced American bicyclist and winner, for a day, of the 2006 Tour de France, has posted to his Web site all the documents relating to his ongoing attempt to clear his name. Some call this crowdsourcing; I'm a little more skeptical. This falls just outside my definition of the term, which involves a person, company or institution deriving value from the crowd's ability to perform some specific task. This isn't the case here: Landis is not, for instance, posting his test results to the scientific community at large in the hope that further analysis will contradict the Anti-Doping Review Board, which recommended sanctions against Landis. But Landis is crowdsourcing a less tangible function: the public's capacity to pardon, from time to time, celebrities that higher authorities have already condemned. Historically such appeals have been made through mediators like newspaper columnists and talk show hosts that shape public opinion. Landis is taking the evidence straight to the crowd. It's a novel approach, whatever the ultimate verdict.

Comments

[trust but verify]

There's active discussion going on about the documents, including independant critique of the presentation at http://trustbut.blogspot.com, and in more anarchic form at http://www.dailypelotonforums.com

What's going on at DPF I'd call crowdsourcing. Landis and his associate "will" have been actively participating in the discussion there for about a week.

TBV

[Jeff Howe]

Depends on how you define it. Ultimately I wouldn't have put it up on the blog if I didn't agree in some manner, but I parsed it pretty thinly. How do you read the DPF discussion as crowdsourcing, TBV?

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