Sarah Blue on June 10, 2010 in Crowdsourcing Uses
As the G8/G20 Summit approaches with a theme of saving the lives of women and children, Chaordix™ works with Oxford University to find ways to deliver safe and effective medical care to women worldwide
Launched this week, Global Voices for Maternal Health gives doctors, nurses and midwives worldwide a voice in how best to provide care to pregnant women in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Hosted by Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Global Voices enables people on the maternal healthcare frontlines to discuss the problems faced, and identify healthcare solutions to decrease the number of women dying unnecessarily in childbirth every year.
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Sarah Blue on June 4, 2010 in Crowdsourcing Uses
Crowdsourcing isn’t just about the explicit outcome of a top idea, or best loved brand strategy. There are hidden gems that prove just as, if not more valuable than the planned outcome. Here are three things you may not have considered:
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Sarah Blue on February 8, 2010 in Best Practices, Crowdsourcing Uses
We had a great call this morning with some people working Mozilla’s Drumbeat project, including Matt Thompson and Mark Surman. We tried to share some insights from the Cambrian House community and hope they were helpful to the Drumbeat crew.
Not everyone contributes in the same way -The Cambrian House community had a pretty complex system to award points to community members, as not everyone contributes in the same way. For any project, you’ve got passionate founding members who are incented by potential reward, interested contributors who are incented by cold hard cash and helpful community members who are happy with a little recognition.
You need a project champion – People are busy. Unless there’s someone around driving the project forward, organizing what needs to happen next, it is very slow going. While nobody likes a drill sergeant, having someone with a vision of where the project is going and a good list of what needs to get done is invaluable.
Break everything down, sum everything up – The idea of joining a project that is entirely crowdsourced is overwhelming. However, the idea of taking on creating copy for an about page, or writing code for a join page isn’t nearly as intimidating. Bit-sized chunks of work are easier for people to grab, depending on their skill-set. Once a week, summarize the high-level view – where projects are at, what projects are doing really well, what’s new – this gives your community members the chance to explore new thing, to know their contributions are making an impact and to stay motivated.
Everybody is good at something – Are your community members contributing to this project as experts pushing a field forward, or are they using the project to work on improving some skills? It is great ot have a mix of both – learners are easily overwhelmed, but can end up being great at QA, or smaller tasks…the same things that experts get really annoyed at having to deal with.
If anyone has anything to add from their experience as a Cambrian House community member, we’d love to hear your advice.
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Randy Corke on October 29, 2009 in Crowdsourcing Uses
Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of European organizations on crowdsourcing projects, and one thing in particular has struck me: Europeans seem to value the collaborative side of crowdsourcing more than the prospects of having the crowd pick a “winner”. Given the geography, history and cultures in European countries, this isn’t surprising. They collaborate cross-boundaries as a matter of their daily lives, even share a common currency.
But it has made me stop and think a bit more about huge collaborative benefits some crowdsourcing models can bring. We’ve talked about the pros and cons of the contest model in past blog posts and even indicated that it’s not our favorite crowdsourcing model. We don’t give it top marks because contests discourage the collaboration that we find to be the most interesting part of crowdsourcing.
Luckily, there are far more crowdsourcing models that do encourage collaboration. With a properly designed crowdsourced campaign, you can enable collaboration among people in different departments who would normally never cross paths as a part of their jobs. What’s cool about that is so often we hear that the breakthrough idea came from someone you never would have expected. Crowdsourcing can also help bridge different corporate cultures, say after a merger of two different companies, by focusing everyone on a particular problem or challenge. And with a community on your crowdsourcing site, it can become an ongoing way to identify people with specific skills or experience for future projects or collaborations.
It’s like the old saying – the journey is more important than the destination. With crowdsourcing, it’s great that you can have the crowd help you select an idea that has potential, but even more powerful, the crowdsourcing process can help everyone organization work better together.
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Patrick Audley on July 9, 2009 in Crowdsourcing Uses
We often talk about crowdsourcing for collective intelligence, or ideation. What about crowdsourcing for crowd production? Putting a call out to get a high volume of simple tasks done quickly and economically – even free. Read More…
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