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. (more…)
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Shelley Kuipers on May 7, 2009 in Crowdsourcing Uses
“What’s the pay off of crowdsourcing?” That’s the question I hear from every executive or manager that I talk to. As companies punch a new holes in their belts to tighten further, everyone is asking how to continue innovating, while reducing costs. Is that even possible? In fact, yes. Economic downturns are a hotbed of breakthroughs. The phrase, “necessity is the mother of all invention” didn’t come out of nowhere!
So why make the shift to open innovation right now? Bottom line: For profit and market leadership. Crowdsourcing has proven to be the most ingenious means to predict and deliver on what the market wants, plus it brings your organization closer to those stakeholders that are most passionate, good or bad. Here are four business cases where we see crowdsourcing paying off
The Four Go-To Ways of Crowdsourcing
- Market prediction
- Product or business innovation
- Research discovery
- Brand Collaboration
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Patrick Audley on April 15, 2009 in Crowdsourcing Uses
We read a lot here on crowdsourcing and social media and we’ll comment from time to time on things we really like. The name of this post comes from a book by Andrew Keen, in which he posits that the lowest common denominator will dominate when crowds rule. The truth is, there are situations where crowdsourcing isn’t a good application - no one at Chaordix is about to get a mysterious lump diagnosed by a popular vote. But crowdsourcing is no great evil, either. Used appropriately, it has power to change business and human life radically for the better. Here’s a few examples of how:
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