Crowdsourcing

The Best Application of Crowdsourcing You Didn't Know About

Occasionally—just occasionally—I gloat. Shortly after writing the original Wired article on crowdsourcing, I predicted that the GPS navigation systems like those produced by TomTom and Garmin would eventually put their own customers to work improving their maps. This bit of prognostication didn't make it into my book, but I was happy to discover a TomTom executive attending a workshop on crowdsourcing I gave in Rotterdam a few months ago. Earlier this year the company launched a feature it calls MapShare, in which the TomTom user community collectively acts to provide updates and fixes to the map.

Today, a trademag covering the "sat-nav" industry ( a lovely British locution, that) notes that users have now made 5 million corrections. “To put this five million milestone in perspective: a one-hour trip made anywhere in Europe or North America will be influenced by twenty to thirty Map Share corrections,” said Corinne Vigreux, managing director TomTom.

Below, a graph charting growth of the MapShare community vis a vis growth of TomTom's user base generally:

 

A Boy Named Finn, Part II

I hate to dilute the focus of the crowdsourcing blog by posting more personal accounts about my family's efforts to care for our developmentally delayed son. Still, I opened these barn doors myself, and have no regrets about it. We received invaluable information after that first blog post was reproduced on such sites as the Scholastic blog and Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab blog. So I decided I would publish one final update, as well as thank everyone who commented, emailed or republished the original post:

Yesterday we took Finn to one of the best pediatric neurologists in New York City. It didn't take him long to issue a diagnosis—Finn, he's quite sure, fits somewhere on the autism spectrum. And so we come to another twist on this bewildering road we're traveling. I'll be charting our progress on this journey, but not here. We've launched a separate blog—A Boy Named Finn—to perform that service. Next week Crowdsourcing.com will return to its regular programming—and content.

Guest Post: Exit Telecommuter—Enter Cloudworker

Besides being a regular correspondent and colleague, our guest blogger today, Venkatesh Rao, has the distinction of writing one of the most penetrating reviews of my book in print or online. Venkat does crowdsourcing research at Xerox, and has also been one of the most consistently interesting voices in the broad area of online collaboration, and I was pleased to have him contribute the following post. It's an open call for contributions to an interesting contest, but better, it's a thoughtful examination on how the crowd and the cloud, two overused and misunderstood terms, relate.

Crowdsourcing and Cloudworking

What happens when on-demand technology meets the crowd? You get the cloudworker: somebody who uses the power of work-anywhere-anytime technology to craft a my-size-fits-me career. Earlier this week, the not-for-profit site, cloudworker.org , launched in beta mode, with a contest that invites participants to submit anything they like—blogs, pictures of workspaces, videos, twitter feeds—that showcases their cloudworker lifestyles. The contest is rather festively titled "Light up your cloud." You can enter until December 28th (there's a bunch of cool prizes, including audio equipment, signed copies of the Crowdsourcing audiobook sponsored by Jeff, and signed copies of Adventures of Johnny Bunko, sponsored by Dan Pink). The plan for the site is to run monthly contests aimed at discovering, and perhaps inventing, the future of work.

The story of how this site came to be is pretty interesting, and I played a small part: coming up with the word cloudworker. (Random aside: the chemist Berzelius was more famous for coining terms than for doing actual chemistry. He came up with, among other things "catalysis", "polymer", "isomer" and "allotrope.")

Here's what happened: Last month, headphone-maker Plantronics ran a crowdsourcing contest to invent a replacement for the dated '70s term, telecommuter. The term has definitely been due for an update, given that increasingly, there is no defined 'there' to commute to or stable 'here' to commute from. Five hundred crowd-contributed entries were whittled down to 10 by a panel of judges, and the crowd stepped in again to pick the winner by popular vote. My dog in the fight—cloudworker—won the day.

The story might have ended there, since I had no plans to go beyond armchair analysis (I've been writing a series of articles on the cloudworker, and his granddaddy, the Organization Man on my business/innovation blog, ribbonfarm.com). But then some friends from an innovation/design startup, WilsonCoLab, decided it would be cool to take the cloudworker concept and run with it. Very flattering. So they launched cloudworker.org, another experiment in the modern tradition of using contests to do research. I donated most of the prizes I won from Plantronics (about $1500 worth of audio equipment) to the cloudworker.org prize kitty, and I like to think of what they are trying to do as mini X-prizes for inventing the future of work.

So if you think you are living out an innovative un-career that is helping define the future of work, do go and enter the contest. You might win, but more importantly, you'll get to participate in redefining the nature of work. But coming back to crowds and clouds, how do they relate?

Convergence Happens: Newspapers and YouTube

Alan Booker, longtime Crowdsourcing.com reader and gadfly, tipped me to a couple great maps this morning. They show how many newspapers in the US and the UK have created YouTube channels to showcase video reporting. The number is larger than most of us would expect—265 in the US alone. Kudos to 10,000 Words (US) and Andy Dickinson (UK) for creating the maps.

The US:

and the UK

View Larger Map

Crowdsourcing: Now With a Real Business Model!

Venture capital is drying up, with less money flowing in fewer deals, but at least one company managed to score a tidy sum. On Tuesday uTest -- which crowdsources software testing -- announced it had secured $5 million in Series B financing.

What makes the news remarkable is that uTest is a crowdsourcing company. Hype notwithstanding, crowdsourcing hasn't yielded more than a few viable businesses in the last few years. We know crowdsourcing exists because we've seen it flourish in the wild, which is to say, a few entrepreneurs have stumbled into very profitable businesses by building vibrant communities first, and monetizing them later.

Breeding crowdsourcing in captivity -- creating instant communities for the purpose of making a quick buch -- has proven far more difficult.

So what makes uTest's investors -- the latest round was led by Longworth Venture Partners -- think it will be the exception?

Simplicity helps, as does the appeal of raw competition: The company allows its clients to post software to its community of testers, who then go about racing through the program looking for bugs. The spoils go to whoever spots a bug first.

And according to sources inside the company, it's already established an enviable track record. It stealth-launched back in February, and all ten of the pilot participants have been converted into paying clients. Its official launch came on August 19. uTest says revenues grew 150 percent over the last three months, and itscommunity now includes nearly 12,000 testers from 144 countries. 

This unique approach to quality assurance -- uTest calls it "pay for performance" -- promises to reduce the often onerous cost of that painful process. According to research firm Gartner, software testing is a $13 billion business, and bugs cost US companies some $60 billion. So is it safe to say crowdsourcing is viable? That's probably as premature as when TechCrunch declared crowdsourcing dead in the water after Cambrian House, one of the first to chart these waters, cried uncle and changed its business model.

But I think it is safe to draw a few conclusions from uTest's success:

1. Coders Make a Great Crowd: Because crowdsourcing is built from the open source template, any company looking to leverage computer professionals has the advantage of an audience already familiar with the basic idea of community production. It's no accident that another crowdsourcing success story, TopCoder, has a similar business plan to uTest, though they build software as well as test it.
2. The Downturn Will Be a Boon to Crowdsourcing: A lot of crowdsourcing models offer cost savings. This promise has often turned out to be illusory, sometimes in comic proportions. But in an era of mass layoffs and draconian cost-cutting, the prospect of dramatically reducing overhead will be too tantalizing to resist. Companies that can actually deliver, as it seems uTest can, will reap the benefits.
3. Crowdsourcing is a Global Phenomenon: Most of the crowdsourcing companies I profiled in my book boast very cosmopolitan user bases, which is to say, less than half of their community members resided inside the United States. One of the comments on the TechCrunch post about uTest Tuesday was telling: "It was just too hard to compete with countries like India who organize groups to test the available products. This means that you as an individual have to be super quick to find the bugs before they do. It is just too stressful compared to the reward."

Welcome to the Flat Earth, friend.

Crossposted from the Epicenter Blog

Mumbai and the Media

The coverage of the Mumbai attacks offered the bizarre and increasingly frequent spectacle: the news media reporting on its inadequacy. Within minutes of the first attacks, on-the-scene reports started appearing on Twitter, Flickr and citizen-media sites like NowPublic.com. Unencumbered by expensive cameras, skeptical editors or professional ethics, citizen journalists filled the breech during the early hours of the crisis, "while there was a vacuum of official information from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks," according to a somewhat breathless New York Times piece yesterday.

How fast was the crowd? I was in the office on Wednesday afternoon, sifting through a mountain of paperwork and generally ignoring my news feeds. "Jesus," exclaimed Noah Shachtman, from his cubicle here at Wired's New York offices. "Terrorist attacks in Mumbai." Less than an hour later Noah published this post to Wired's Danger Room blog, noting that dozens of videos (there are now hundreds) had been uploaded to YouTube, a GoogleMap showing attack sites had been created and blood donors could find out which blood bank to go to on Twitter. Also noted: The fact that Wikipedia was transformed from a reference site to a one-stop shop for the latest updates, a news aggregator nonpariel. (The page now runs over 6,000 words and contains 226 citations.) How fast was the crowd? This chart (courtesy of tweetip) shows the spike in "#Mumbai terror" tweets in the hours following the first shots.

 

What's interesting isn't so much that people used social media to report on a tragic, rapidly unfolding calamity. What's interesting is how commonplace that phenomenon has become. It characterized the coverage of the Asian tsunami, the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina, the Kenyan political unrest, to cite a few examples. It's become institutionalized to the point where the New York Times had sent out a "call for eyewitness accounts" by 5 PM on Wednesday. That's a good thing, because having established that citizen journalism, unlike Santa Claus, actually exists—that it's feasible, and that amateurs can add enormous value to the coverage of an event—we can move on to critiques of its actual usefulness.

I think we're going to see just such a crique playing out in the next several days, but a few excellent posts have already emerged that effectively problematize the simplistic (and unhelpful) "look-ma-we-beat-CNN-at-their-own-game" back-patting that floods the blogosphere after any one of these calamities. My hope is that we're entering an era of Crowdsourcing 2.0 when it comes to journalism.

Writing on the Made By Many blog, Tim Malbon asks if the coverage of the attacks on Twitter wasn't less a "crowdsourced version of the news" than "an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets"? (He has an excellent follow-up as well, asking how we might create a filtered version of twitter, to keep out the "twats.")

Another valuable source of critical commentary comes from the social media scholar, Gaurav Mishra. He's created a "work-in-progress case study" of how citizen journalists covered the Mumbai attacks, and as far as I can tell it's unrivaled in terms of depth and critical analysis. More, I'm sure, is to come.