When I meet prospective clients, one of my standard soapbox statements is about how crowdsourcing is in their future and they should get started sooner rather than later. Ok, Ok, you’re thinking I’m required to say that, because I sell Crowdsourcing technology and services but actually, a huge part of what I do is just educating people on what crowdsourcing is. My statement is more to make the point that this isn’t a fad – open innovation is not only here to stay, but will become a standard part of how most companies conduct business in the next few years. How can I be so confident in making that prediction? Two reasons:

1. First, the concepts behind crowdsourcing aren’t new at all. Companies have always worked hard at getting market input. Beta customers, market surveys and focus groups are all part of getting intelligence and data from the crowd. Crowdsourcing represents a significant improvement in how companies can do that by leveraging new breakthroughs in social media technology and understanding how online crowd behave. If companies want market input, crowdsourcing is a better way to get it.
2. As more and more companies invite their crowds in, consumers are going to start demanding the same from all brands and products they care about. We all want to have our voice heard, and crowdsourcing provides that conduit. Just as we’ve come to expect every company we do business with to have a website, we will one day expect every company to have a place where we can provide our input on product direction, business models and more.

So, crowdsourcing will be in the future of most companies – when I can’t tell you for sure. It might be in six months, a year or three years from now. I can tell you that when your customers are screaming for it is not the time to start. By getting started now, maybe even with an internally focused crowdsourcing site to get employees more involved, you’ll get familiar and comfortable with the crowdsourcing process. You’ll understand how it works within your company culture and develop critical skills internally for successful crowdsourcing. The sooner you get going, the better off you will be when your crowd demands it.

photo by: gilderic

Does what they see affect what you get with crowdsourced input?

To get truly valid data on crowd demand do you have to remove the risk of a popularity contest? That’s one of the common questions we get asked around crowdsourcing and voting.

To shed some light on this, we thought we’d share what we discussed with good friend Veer Gidwaney, Founder of Humanity Calls - a platform where crowds of people assemble online to evaluate charities and make donations to those organizations which perform best - set to launch early 2010.

Here’s what we’ve seen as the affects of transparency in the crowds we’ve worked with:

Crowd votes totally hidden

Pros

• Makes people think for themselves & eliminates group think
• Produces incredibly valuable data

Cons

• Seeing “group think” is interesting, engaging and can foster participation
• Without ranking of ideas/solutions into top voted, it can be overwhelming for people to sort through and parse items for voting

Vote totals shown, individual votes hidden

Pros

• Presenting highest vote listing engages crowd, gets them voting
• Crowd’s time gets focused on crowd-deemed highest quality ideas/solutions

Cons

• Biases crowd energy towards top voted ideas/solutions – other high potential ideas never get seen
• Earliest in ideas/solutions biased to get most votes

Individual votes and vote totals seen by all

Pros

• With full transparency, the amount of malicious votes drops dramatically
• Crowd has means to spot and report voting irregularities

Cons

• People swayed to vote for ideas/solutions by the most popular crowd members
• As with just showing vote totals – attention biased to top voted/earliest in ideas

So with limits on all voting models – how do you best limit bias? First, pick the model with the strengths best suited to your crowd and purpose. Second, consider other means to reduce the risk of bias:

• Broaden what’s filtered & presented: Would you get more useful results and participation displaying not only top voted, but most viewed, most commented or a random display of ideas and solutions?
• Get experts to aid in filtering: Might an expert panel reviewing all ideas and filtering to top ideas for a tournament get to the most valuable winning idea?
• Pace/Batch the voting: Consider weekly or monthly showdowns to keep the volume of ideas/solutions manageably viewable by the crowd– with a tournament of finalists at the end.

These are some of our best practices & lessons learned. What have you seen work to limit crowd bias in voting?

Thanks Veer for reaching out to us!

photo by: starbright31

Tim O’Reilly asked Gov 2.0 Summitters to imagine small govt with big impact

Web 2.0 summits have long been respected for bringing bright minds together to explore what’s working and what’s next in technology. The man behind the summits, Tim O’Reilly, hosted the first Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC Sept 9-10. Two of us from team Chaordix went to check it out. O’Reilly framed the conference around the idea of government as a platform - not just a body that pushes policy at people.

O’Reilly talked about meeting government leaders that surprised him in terms of their intellect, passion and desire to truly do the right thing. I’ve had that same experience. O’Reilly challenged presenters and attendees to think of the move to “transparency in government” not just as enabling watchdogging of government activity but as a new opportunity for government and the private sector to better exchange services and data.

Clay Shirky summed it up saying “the government needs to have a wholesale relationship with people, not retail.” Shirky used the Apps for Democracy community initiative as an example of getting it right. DC’s Office of the CTO offered up raw government data and invited residents and software developers to make something of it with apps to improve city service requests with $50,000 prize money up for grabs. The crowd contributed 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days. Contenders included apps like everyblock.com which let citizens see crime, construction and business license information by street address, the always popular pothole and more fix and monitor app FixMyCityDC, and the ultimate winner an Open 311 app that allows users to submit city service requests via iPhone (buy the app on iTunes) or as a Facebook app.

It was an interesting time to be in DC with Obama’s back to school address and speech on the US Healthcare Bill. It felt like people at the Summit, regardless of political stripes, were striving to be hopeful about possibilities for US govt openness. O’Reilly cast out the challenge ‘Could we get government to be smaller with an impact that’s bigger?” It’s an idea worth taking home to Canada.

By now, anyone who is familiar with crowdsourcing knows about the crowd-sourced production model that has produced highly successful products like Linux and Wikipedia.

In fact, that was Jeff Howe’s original definition of crowdsourcing.   But the model of tapping the power of a crowd to break down a seemingly huge job into smaller manageable pieces is applicable in lots of other areas that we are just starting to identify.

For example, Crowd Power, one of our clients, just launched healthcareforus.org to facilitate a crowd-powered review, summarization and rating of the actual US Healthcare bill.    One of the founders, Sheri Clark, was concerned that misinformation in the media was not helping people understand the real issue at hand.  As a mother, she was motivated to understand how the legislation might affect her family.   Since the bill as drafted has over 1100 pages, she became concerned that no-one would really understand it – legislators included.   She had heard about The Guardian in the UK using crowdsourcing as a way to get a large group of people to sift through a large number of documents, and thought that a similar approach would work well for the healthcare legislation

Sheri had heard of Chaordix and reached out to us for help in putting together a site, with a very short timeframe.   We saw it not only as a good application for crowdsourcing, but also a way to apply crowdsourcing for potentially very meaningful benefit.     That said, it’s a new model of crowdsourcing so we’re learning on the job.   Our goal was to create a site that is simple to use that would also provide valuable insight into how people feel about the actual bill.  Now that healthcareforus.org is live (just this week!), we’re wondering where else this model could be applied.  What other overwhelming tasks can we break down and get the crowd to quickly produce something of value?

Thanks to Edward Boches, I had the opportunity to lead a great interactive session on crowdsourcing with some of his team at Mullen.  Edward is a strong advocate of the benefits of social media for businesses and his agency is more open to the idea than most.

During the session, one topic that came up was “how does crowdsourcing differ from surveys and contests?”  The argument could be made that anytime you reach out to the crowd for input, you are crowdsourcing.  Fair enough.  But if you stop there, you’re missing out on the biggest benefits of true crowdsourcing.

Surveys, contests and polls capture feedback from the crowd.  This is a good first step and there’s no arguing it does provide value. However, you’re missing the value derived from getting the crowd involved in evolving and enhancing the ideas. The multi-step process of ranking/selecting/brainstorming/voting that only comes with a full crowdsourcing process provides a platform for two-way discussion. It is a direct way for companies to get input they wouldn’t otherwise have on hand, or even realize they needed to ask about.

Rarely do Ideas start off perfectly formed. Ideas become more powerful as they are honed by collective wisdom.   This process of refinement not only makes the idea stronger, but also starts a coalition of support – it’s no longer just an idea that one person thinks has merit.

In crowdsourcing, you can see this exact process happen but on an even greater scale.   People from different backgrounds and demographics, who don’t know each other, can collaborate on ideas to make them better. At the same time, the company behind the crowdsourcing site can start to get an indicator of market acceptance.

It’s the cross-pollination of ideas, thoughts and critiques among a diverse crowd that not only provides the most value from crowdsourcing, but also guards against biased results.

Is crowdsourcing better than simple surveys and contests? If you’re looking for a way to quickly pull information from a crowd, not necessarily. But if you really want the most value of collective wisdom or a continuous flow of input and ideas, have the discipline to follow a full crowdsourcing path.