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?