Crowdsourcing

A Prelude to a Post ... or, Is Google the World's Most Crowdsourcey Company?

This is just the stuff for a half-baked, Friday evening post when my traffic begins to dive into the weekend lull.

I'm going to admit this right now: There's one big, glaring omission in my book, and it's Google. While I devote a few pages here and there to the Mountain View Monolith, I hardly give it the attention it deserves. You'd think writing a book would provide enough space to do anything. In fact, it's an exercise in reduction. I wound up taking a chunk on Google Earth out entirely, and by the time Android was launched I was already in edits. But for the record, I believe a separate Crowdsourcing book could be written using Google as one single, fat case study.

And that's good. Because a writer's blog is sort of an ongoing appendix to his book. I want to lay out the areas in which Google is crowdsourcing. Ideally, I'll revisit each of the bullet points below in more depth in the coming weeks (Ed's Note: Emphasis in previous sentence mine. Jeff is too ...mercurial, let's say, in his posting habits to make promises of future content).

• Google Earth: See Sketch-Up

• GoogleMaps: See Google MapMaker

• PageRank: I write about this in Chapter 8. It's a tad controversial to cram this most elemental part of the Web under the Crowdsourcing banner, but in the end I decided it'd be erroneous not to include it.

• Android

• Google Answers

• Google Moderator

And I'm leaving lots of stuff out. I gotta go home and bathe my kids. I'll try to come back to this post over the weekend. In the meantime, let's consider this a group working paper. I know I have Googlers out there reading this! I'm issuing an open call to add to my list.

The Tools of Globalization

I don't generally blog press releases (Ed's Note: If Jeff did, I could probably get him to post more than twice a week), but one from InnoCentive today caught my fancy. In brief: Non-profit in India uses the InnoCentive network to design technology crucial to allowing them to expand their worthy efforts. This isn't without precedent. The group Prize4Life, which is trying to find a cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, has used InnoCentive to identify biomarkers for the disease. But the particulars in this case make it worth highlighting.

ASSET (Achieving Sustainable Social Equality through Technology) India Foundation is a non-profit organization that helps train the children of sex workers and girls rescued from trafficking, in technology, so they can escape the sex slave industry in India. (Not that anyone doubts the immense, multi-layered value such a project has in India, but please rush home anyway and rent the incredible documentary, Born Into Brothels).

While ASSET had computer training centers (they also teach English to the children) in India's major cities, the organization received 10 to 12 requests each month for new centers in much smaller towns. But opening facilities in villages presented several hurdles, the most onerous one being the lack of employment opportunities in such areas. For ASSET to spread to rural India, they not only needed equipment and funding, but a way to allow IT companies to open branches in such areas. And to do that they needed power. And for power they needed electricity. Or did they?

What if the hardware needed to open shop could be run off solar energy? At this point another non-prof, Global Giving, connected ASSET to the Rockefeller Foundation, which agreed to pay to post the problem to InnoCentive's site. Several months later some 27 solutions had been submitted. The "challenge" called for the design of a solar-powered wireless router composed of low-cost, readily available hardware and software components. A few months later, a software engineer named Zacary Brown came up with the solution. "I found the problem interesting because it combined several of my hobbies," Brown says. He got discouraged at several points, but kept plugging away.

What I love about this is that, because InnoCentive seeker companies keep all the intellectual property, ASSET can port this solution all over India, and even give the design to sister organizations doing work in other developing economies. I'm out of depth here, but I'd hazard a guess that this little piece of low-cost tech could have a major affect on how IT companies in India and beyond do business.

And my favorite detail? Brown's design runs on the original crowdpowered project—Linux!

Crowdsourcing the Book Review Process: Follow Up

Two words: Thank you! Two more: You rock! Excuse me if I gush, but the response to my little experiment was, quite literally overwhelming. I haven't counted up the number of requests for review copies of Crowdsourcing, but it easily exceeds 150. And I have good news! My US publisher, Crown Business, was so impressed by the reaction that they've agreed to donate additional books to make sure that everyone who has requested a copy will receive one. So keep those requests coming! And to salt the mine, I'll also endeavor to sign each and every copy.

In the meantime, this has made fulfillment a bit of a challenge. It's one thing to throw a few dozen books into envelopes and toss them in the mail bin. It's quite another to sort through a few hundred requests. I'd hoped to send out the books today, but it looks like they'll be going out early next week instead. Rest assured, however, they'll be on their way soon.

Most importantly (for my purposes, at least), I think we now have a solid basis to judge the efficacy of this little experiment. I've received book reviews in some major publications, including the London Times, the Financial Times, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer and, to my great delight, a very positive notice in this week's issue of Business Week. The reviews certainly helped sales, but none drove the kind of spike that publishers like to see. The question that will presumably be answered in the coming month is whether this grassroots approach—leveraging the long tail of reviewers—will have a greater or lesser impact than the mass media.

In Search of the Long Tail: Crowdsourcing the Book Review Process

Today I received an amusing email:

Dear Mr.Howe,
How are you today? I hope you are doing great! I just saw a copy of your book at Barnes & Noble. I read the inside cover and thought you're really onto something and would like to buy it, however I'm getting laid off at the end of the week. I was wondering if you had an extra copy you don't need that you can mail me one to my house. I would really appreciate it a lot.
I hope to find a job soon.
Signed, Christopher Aguirre

My initial thought was, "Sorry about your job buddy, but actually, well, no. I sell these books of mine. It's how my publisher makes money." But as it happens I just received a few dozen copies of the Crowdsourcing Book on Tape. These come on top of a few dozen copies of the UK edition of the book, which arrived on top of my stack of unused galley copies and finished hardbacks of the US edition. In other words, I'm swimming in copies of a book bound for the pulping machine. Which gave me an idea.

The whole point of giving away advance copies is to generate buzz and, ideally, press. We identify individual writers and bloggers we think will be interested in reviewing the book. Then we send them a book, unbiden, and hope for the best. But if you think about it, this is a pretty antiquated system, and neglects the long, long tail of reader-bloggers that are really responsible for driving a book's popularity. Why not turn this equation on its head, and ask the crowd whether they'd like to review the book?

So that's what I'm going to do. While supplies last, I'm willing to send you a copy of the US, UK or audio version of the Crowdsourcing book. All you need to do is post a comment containing your address, a link to your Website and your good faith testament that you do intend to read and review the book, and I'll zip one off to you. **UPDATE: You must provide an URL to an existing blog, or otherwise specify what forum in which you'd like to review the book. We’re crowdsourcing the book review process, not the book reading process, which is, if you think about it, pretty crowdsourcey already.**

And yes, I did send a book to Christopher. Let's all wish him luck with his job search.

Crowdsourcing: A Proposal

I received an email from a friend last week: "I'm going to propose... I'll let [NAME REDADCTED] be kidnapped to the most romantic location of New York where I'll ask her the big question. Problem: I don't know where that is. Since you are a New Yorker you maybe know a spot, but maybe your audience on Crowdsourcing.com knows some great spots as well. Can we do a small crowdsourcing experiment on your site?"

The answer, obviously, is of course! Any long-time New Yorker is sure to have their own opinions in this regard. I personally favor the Cloisters, but there are surely a hundred others. (I wound up popping the question to my wife in the least romantic spot in New York, a traffic median in Murray Hill. I'll spare you the details of how this came to be.) So let's hear yours! What's the most romantic spot in the entire city in which to  propose?

Reviews: Newsweek, FT and Philadelphia Inquirer

I landed in London last night. It's been a pretty harrowing few days. My wife left last Thursday for rural Illinois, I dropped our daughter off with friends and then took our one year old and caught up with Alysia in Kewanee, Illinois, hog capital of the world (That last is no idle boast, but a decree passed down by an act of Congress in 1942). We were there for her grandmother's funeral, a very sad affair. She was 91, had been ill for several months, had lived a long, rich life, enjoyed the love and devotion of a large family and many friends and none of that offers us a bit of comfort. We weren't ready for her to go. Perhaps when you really love someone, you never are, I don't know.

Unlike me to get personal on these pages, I know, but "Munca," aka Ann Binder, was a great old broad and a dear friend and possessed one of the most searching intelligences of anyone I'd ever met. Ah, but I mentioned reviews, didn't I? Good stuff came in over the weekend:

Newsweek gives the crowdsourcing book what I might call a qualified rave:

Crowdsourcing may represent a true revolution in how human communities form and interact, and an early indicator of where the Internet is leading society. And Howe's book does a better job than anything I've seen of convincing you of that fact.

The Financial Times also published its review this weekend.  It's generally positive, but takes me to task for casting crowdsourcing in a pollyannish light. Here's the critic,  James Harkin:

If James Surowiecki was the Karl Marx of the movement, favouring rule by the many, Howe is its Lenin. Howe is focused on how to turn theory into lucrative practice. More than Surowiecki, too, he believes the internet is capable of unleashing the wisdom of the crowd.

I think this misrepresents the book, and it certainly misrepresents my thinking. While I fill the book with case studies, many of them highlight ways in which crowdsourcing fails, and I explicitly caution against companies attempting to use crowdsourcing strictly as a financial strategy. More to the point, I reinforce Surowiecki's caution that without the right conditions collective intelligence fails to emerge, and in fact go into great detail about why this is so, using Scott E. Page's work as a guide. Luckily, I'll have the chance to bring such differences up with James personally, as he'll be hosting my book party tomorrow night.

And then finally there's this from the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Chris Satullo. Not precisely a review, but it's a nice meditation on the themes in the book, with a few apt citations.

Crowdsourcing in the UK

Soon I'm going to get back to what I love best—writing about crowdsourcing. For a little longer I'll instead be writing about the writing of crowdsourcing, which is to say, promoting myself and my book. The British edition of the Crowdsourcing Book was published last week. As my regular readers know, the British version is identical in nearly every way except for one notable exception: The cover was crowdsourced, or to be precise, coversourced. The winning cover is markedly different from the US version. Compare:

(Ed's Note: You'll have to imagine the margins yourself.) It's a different approach than the US edition, as well it should be. It is also, by any measure, a pretty risky cover. I love it, but am also curious to see how it plays on English (and Australian! And New Zealand!) bookshelves. As it happens, I'll be able to find out firsthand, as I'll be spending much of next week in the mother country. If anyone out there happens to live in London or Rotterdam come check me out Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (details here) or at the Emerce eDay event in Rotterdam the following day. (Don't even ask how I'm getting from one venue to the next. Hint: the Chunnel plays a role).

And for those of you actually reading my press (Hi Mom!), I've already received a few reviews pegged to the British release. The first appeared in the London Times. It's mildly critical, accusing me of giving too "breathless" an account of crowdsourcing's emergence. Ouch. I'd take some issue with that. The heart of my book—the middle section in which I dig deep into everything from iStockPhoto to Kiva.org to my own foray into crowdsourcing, Assignment Zero—contained a great deal of skepticism. But it's futile to quibble with reviewers, and I'm flattered to receive column inches in such an august publication. Management Today, Britain's leading business magazine, gave the book a rave, to my considerable satisfaction.

 

Crowdsourcing Book Excerpted on Wired

Today I published the first excerpt of the book on Wired.com. It's a close look at iStockphoto, and raises the question of whether the transformation we're seeing stock photography is merely the canary in the coalmine. I purposely chose a section that's meant to provoke some back-and forth. Hope some of that comes back to crowdsourcing.com. Should be up all weekend—enjoy!

Crowdsourcing Medical Expertise Part Two: Reader Comments

Every once in a great while I find the comments to a post so thoughtful and intriguing I decide to "upstream" them into their own blog post, both to draw more attention to what I deem to be valuable points, and as an attempt to provoke more debate. A few days ago I received an email from a Louisiana-based writer and consultant named Louise Maynard. Having endured contradictory interpretations of her own MRI scans, she wondered whether their might not be a crowdsourcing application in, essentially, amateur radiology. In this case, the comments made for better reading than my original post.

The implications of crowdsourcing the act of diagnosis are troubling, problematic and also tantalizing. To some extent, medical expertise is already being crowdsourced, as the commenters pointed out. Nalts pointed out that the site CrazyMeds runs a very active forum in which people gather to discuss the ups and downs of the medicated life. As Nalts notes, he'd rather trust the consensus regarding a drug formed by 100 patients than a single doctor. (Ed's Note: It's also worth reading the witty and poignant personal essay on the front page.)

Jen McCabe Gorman notes that the site American Well poses an interesting case study in that it vets medical professionals and then allows them to offer their services online, which isn't far from what Maynard is proposing

I was also happy to see Alpheus Bingham—founder of InnoCentive and a veteran scientist (he holds a Stanford PhD in organic chemistry) in his own right—join the conversation. He aptly problematizes the prospect of crowdsourcing diagnosis: "Of course, it goes without saying that many 'portions' of the overall healthcare process (including research objectives) can and should be crowdsourced for a host of reasons that would improve outcome and quality," he writes. As most of the readers of this blog realize, this is an essential component of what companies like InnoCentive, NineSigma and YourEncore do—broadcast research problems to large groups of experts and non-experts alike in the hopes of unearthing novel solutions. However, "the specific issue of crowdsourcing diagnosis or treatment is far less clear."

On the one hand, the numbers would seem to favor such a project. Here's Alph:

An expert (say, right 95% of the time) is wrong 5% of the time. An amateur might be wrong 20% of the time, but the chance that two amateurs are both wrong is only 20%x20% or 4%. So two "informed" amateurs consistently reading a scan or collection of lab results has a pretty good record. Hmm, seems like a clear case FOR the crowd...

Ah, but the numbers can deceive:

Of course, as the number of semi-professionals or informed amateurs goes up, the chance of them ALL being wrong goes down, but the chance of getting mixed diagnoses goes up very fast. (73% say "benign" and 27% say "malignant.") What to do then? Majority rules? Supermajority required?

When is the "vote" compelling enough to stake your treatment on it? It would be well outside the scope of a blog comment to delve deeply into this. But let's briefly return to our two amateurs. When they agree there is a 96% chance of them being right. But how often do they agree? If they are looking at a cancerous scan, with an 80% individual accuracy rate, they agree on the cancer diagnosis only 64% of the time. They split opinions (a very confusing state of affairs since they are equally likely to get it right and now you don't know who to believe) 32% of the time (that's a lot) and they both get it wrong only 4% (as we said already). There may well be some sophisticated statistical analyses that would supplement such crowdsourcing approaches -- BUT -- 'experts' or 'crowds' or 'crowds of experts,' there will remain ambiguity when dealing with judgement calls. Our penchant for certainty is just not going to get fully satisfied.

This is, to some degree, the situation we're already in (albeit with very small crowds) when several professionals are asked to interpret medical data (such as an MRI scan): Ambiguity. That said, in the end Alph makes a strong case for the exploration of a crowdsourcing effort that would entice the semi-professionals to engage in such a project: "Total non-experts (the masses referred to in the post) do NOT help matters as their input is just noise -- obscuring a signal. But the crowd of semi-experts could well be, in my opinion, desirable, and we should investigate appropriate systems and knowledge aggregation tools for its exploitation."

Finally, Daniel Reda and Alexandra Carmichael, the co-founders of the very promising CureTogether.com, both posted useful comments. Here's Daniel: 

What would happen if you crowdsourced interpretation or even diagnosis? Well, the consensus interpretation of 100 amateurs on your MRI would probably not be at all helpful. What you'd want is a method to select the best interpretations and have them bubble up to the top. How do you select the best interpretations? One way is to keep historical data on how accurate those predictions were once more data became available. Ideally we'd gather data on doctors' performance as well. It's not about credentials - it's about accuracy. If the doctors don't want to participate, then their judgments will look progressively weaker compared with those of a supposed amateur who was proven to be correct 99% of the time on thousands of MRI interpretations.

"It's not about credientials—it's about accuracy." That's as concise a definition of crowdsourcing as it gets. Here's hoping we can keep this conversation going.

Miscellany: The Book Tour Begins ... And Two Reviews

I leave tomorrow morning for San Francisco and Seattle. I'll be speaking a few book stores, stopping by Microsoft and recording a segment for Dr. Moira Gunn's excellent show, Tech Nation. In reality, I've been giving talks about the concepts in the book for a few years now, though it picked up considerably this summer. I should, by all rights, be sick of the drill, but I'm not. I endlessly futz with my schpiel, adding new elements and taking out any that bore me. For the last talk I created a 60-slide Keynote presentation. Now I'm not sure whether I like it. Tomorrow I'll be at Kepler's (details here) in Menlo Park, just south of San Francisco, and I'm thinking of doing a straight reading from the book, something I've yet to do.

A few reviews of crowdsourcing have come over the transom in the last few days. The New York Post gave it a thoughtful write-up, as did the Miami Herald. They're both positive, though the Post piece is less a review than a meditation. I'd love to say I ignore my reviews, but it'd be a lie. In fact I read them breathlessly, heart racing. So much for staying detached. In other self-glorifying news, the Independent in London has excerpted my book in its Tuesday edition.

Finally, here's what's getting all the Tweets today: A piece on CNET about Peugot's recent campaign to crowdsource a car design. Sexy pics!