SMSing in times of distress: Tagging the SMS!

The concept of crowdsourcing crisis information was started by Ushahidi in Kenya in 2008. Ushahidi enabled the ‘crowd’ to communicate crisis information via SMS, e-mail, or Web entry. Subsequently, the information received was time stamped and geo tagged to create a crisis map to report incidents to multiple organizations engaged in crisis response. Since its inception, Ushahidi has been used to map anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, track global Swine Flu cases, collect eye witness reports during the 2008-09 Gaza war, monitor 2009 Afghan presidential elections and manage humanitarian crisis response in Haiti.

Kashmir, termed by the United Nations as one of the most dangerous places on earth, is witness to numerous terrorist attacks. While living in Kashmir and experiencing the circumstances right after the terrorist attacks and the nature of relief operations, I have always felt that the ensuing conditions of terrorist attacks are similar to most of the crisis situations viz. natural disasters, civil unrest.

It makes me wonder – what if an Ushahidi type crisis response system is implemented in Kashmir to deter and manage relief efforts using terrorist attacks? Will it be useful? Will it work? Can it be implemented?

To me, it seems that the benefits of implementation of a crisis response system are manifold. The benefits range from timely crisis response from health and policing agencies to efficient information flow. Additionally, it can also be used to develop early warning systems and to chronicle the crisis. I think that the intelligence agencies might also find it useful for identifying patterns of the terrorist attacks. These benefits of the crisis response system have been realized in Haiti, Gaza War etc.

Moreover, similar initiatives have been successfully implemented worldwide. Therefore, I think that it will be easy to pick up useful experiences, best practices, and lessons learnt from those to make the implementation of the current system in Kashmir easier. Also, it is quite evident to everyone that Kashmir attracts a lot of international media attention. Therefore, finding volunteers willing to help in the initial rollout of the crisis response system will not be difficult as the initiative will gain global visibility soon. In Kashmir, mobile phone is a gadget everyone has in their pockets. With the ubiquity of mobile phones in urban and rural areas, and the natural inclination of the general public to use mobile phones the success of such an initiative seems probable, if not guaranteed.

Most importantly, as per the operation model I suggest the cost to run such a system will be minimal. The Ushahidi platform is open source and the volunteer based model will ensure that the operational costs of the system will be minimal. Also, the scalable nature of the system as evident from Ushahidi implementations worldwide ensures that the system can be implemented across other regions in India and abroad, if need be. The implementation in Kashmir offers benefits which might later be accrued to similar implementations elsewhere. Therefore, the benefits of such an implementation seem immense and the cost minimal.

It is high time that Kashmir should have a crisis response system. It might just be the solution the defense forces have been waiting for!

Ankit Sharma is a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, UK and a resident of Jammu and Kashmir, India. He can be contacted at a.sharma13@lse.ac.uk

photo by: Barry Pousman

What came first, the chicken or the egg? This paradox has perplexed philosophers for millennia.

In the progressive workplace, a similar dilemma confounds executives. In the pursuit of open innovation, what comes first: Innovation created internally, or innovation developed beyond the organization?

People talk about open innovation. It’s the mantra of leadership experts and workplace counselors across the business landscape. But internal versus external innovation also presents a dichotomy. Often conflicting in nature, many proponents of open innovation get tripped up on why external innovation can fail to take root.

In my opinion, the paradox is easily answered: External innovation is destined to fail if the imperatives of internal innovation have not first been developed, deployed and adhered to. Workplace pundits extol the virtues of external innovation, but if innovation isn’t alive and thriving internally, innovation itself will fall on the scrapheap of failed initiatives.

Effective innovation isn’t about the Chief Innovation Officer or even the CEO mandating from on high what milestones R&D or Engineering must pursue or achieve. In fact, innovation that’s “required” to come from R&D, Engineering or some other “Department of Innovation” is susceptible to the Not Invented Here syndrome. If it wasn’t created by someone who’s mandate it is to do just that, it’s often likely to be squashed by exactly those who didn’t come up with the idea. “Quit meddling in my sandbox,” is the complaint.

Those barriers have to be removed. Effective innovation begins with breaking down silos that separate departments, divisions or teams – and encouraging, even welcoming participation from across the organization.

Sure, those directly charged with leading innovation might come up with good ideas. But will they speak to the heart of the organization and how it interfaces with its customers or constituency?

For example, since 1967, Hollywood Woodwork in Hollywood, Florida, has specialized in custom woodwork for use in premier hotels, spas, casinos, country clubs, public projects and corporate offices throughout the United States and Caribbean. Then the recession hit, and the company saw a drop off in its traditional business.

Then the company opened up and solicited ideas from all employees – not just those in Product Development. This led to a simple question: “Can we do church pews?” No deep analysis by skilled research teams or high-paid consultants. Just a simple query that made company executives wonder: Can we?

They could. And now, Hollywood Woodwork does, making many other products utilizing their assets. Building church benches helped diversify the company – and keep it afloat during the recession.

The request also made executives there realize something else: We must be receptive to potential innovation from all internal sources. Not-invented-here doesn’t exist at Hollywood Woodwork. Innovative suggestions are welcomed from across its workforce of 150.

With the foundations of open innovation secure within an organization, only then should a company seek innovation from beyond its walls. If you don’t have internal innovation down pat, and you haven’t removed all the emotional barriers that inhibit the free exchange of ideas, you never will embrace what comes from the outside.

Successful open innovation, then, becomes the preamble to effective external innovation -  if it’s needed at all. Paradox solved, the entire team can focus on true innovation.

By Robert Brands with Jeff Zbar

Robert Brands is the founder of InnovationCoach.com, and the author of “Robert’s Rules of Innovation“: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival, with Martin Kleinman and published by Wiley.

Crowdsourcing is as much about the process and the theater of creation as the output.  Maybe even more so.  A lot of my job is to explain to our clients that not only is the content we produce incredibly valuable (that’s easy to understand) but the engagement, participation, sharing, and all the other intangible (an important) benefits of crowdsourcing are what you’re paying for?  If no one can understand it’s value, then how do we charge for it?

Indulge me in a Chuck Klosterman-esque fantasy for a second…

INT.  INDUSTRIAL BROOKLYN, NY OFFICE BUILDING

This doesn’t really look or feel like an office, but it must be because there are a lot of people working here.  “The Hold Steady” is playing over a house PA or Muzak system.  There’s an overwhelming concentration of Apple products, exposed brick, exposed heat ducts, exposed electrical outlets–a lot of exposed shit…

JAMES DEJULIO (30s, Italian-ish) has a room of hipster looking (boat shoes, rock tees, tight jeans, ironic moustaches, etc.) forward thinking BRAND EXECUTIVES captivated after demo-ing the Tongal Platform.

EXECUTIVE #1

This is really cool. Brilliant model.  I really think we can make this work.

EXECUTIVE #2

How many videos do you think we’ll get?

DEJULIO

Depends.  50.  100 maybe.

EXECUTIVE #2

Really? And people all over the world are going to create these…for us?

DEJULIO

Yeah, if we do it right.

EXECUTIVE #1

Ok.  If this program produces 50 decent user generated ads for us and we’ve paid out

$10,000..that’s pretty good.

EXECUTIVE #1

That’s rad—and no one in this room is going to lose their jobs over that.  Right Julian?

(beat)

Julian?

Executive #2, not paying attention is texting on his iPhone.

EXECUTIVE #2

Oh, sorry, I just saw a tweet that the Kogi truck is outside.

EXECUTIVE #1

Ok.  Let’s do this.

DEJULIO

Hey that’s really great guys, I love early adopters.

DeJulio, ready to bust out the Tongal green-colored business Amex and take his new clients out for some over priced Micro Brews goes in for a high five…no reaction.  A long beat.  EXECUTIVE #1 whispers into EXECUTIVE #2′s ear.   EXECUTIVE #2 nods, breaks up the action.

EXECUTIVE #2

Hang on, what’s your CPM?

EXECUTIVE #1

How many users do you have?

EXECUTIVE #2

Is it comparable to Facebook?  What about traffic?

DEJULIO (to self)

Christ.

(to group)

Why does that still matter?

It’s easy to measure (and charge) for impressions.  But what are those impressions really worth?  I think the reason that a lot of people fail to wrap their heads around the value of crowdsourcing (and other forms of social media) is that there’s no metric for it yet.  Do social media companies need a rating agency?  What characteristics would justify a AAA rating for a social media platform?

Before we can even entertain that idea, businesses need to begin to assess a real value to what engagement and total brand immersion are worth.  They need to understand that if a 1,000 people completely engaged will always be more valuable than 100,000 people who aren’t paying attention.

Pretty bold statement, but why do I think it’s especially accurate for a creative, well-designed and executed crowdsourcing campaign?

For example, if there’s a crowdsourcing project on Tongal to create a 30 second spot and a member of the community opts into spending an afternoon thinking about a concept for a commercial for your product-maybe even researching your product and asking his or her friends for their input–then distills that down to 140 characters and submits it to a Tongal campaign, what’s that worth?  What’s that dialogue worth?  What’s it worth compared to 100,000 people fast forwarding through your ad on DVR? Or, flipping right past it in a magazine while getting a whiff of some terrible cologne?

What about when that user comes back in a week and opts-in to gathering a group of friends to spend a weekend creating a video for your product? He has to enlist help, he has to call in favors, he has to spend a few hours editing the film.  When the film is completed, he’ll begin sharing it with the friends who helped him, his mom, and their moms-because they’re all proud of it-and what’s just magically happened is that all of these people have become emotionally vested in your product.  (pssst-you may also have a fantastic piece of work which you now have the option to purchase)

The interesting thing is that the user has chosen to do this.  He’s having fun.  He either had a previous affinity for your product or service, or he just discovered it and he likes it.  Especially, he likes you because you’re letting him in the door by giving him a chance to do something he enjoys and your product is the catalyst.

How can you compare that to a banner ad?

James deJulio is the President and Co-founder of Tongal. He is a partner in Half Shell Entertainment and formerly Vice President of The Robert Evans Company at Paramount Pictures. In mid-2008, disillusioned with the inefficient, bureaucratic manner in which films were being developed, produced and financed, he decided to “shake things up a bit”. He began exploring with Jack Hughes ways in which the TopCoder thinking could be applied to creating filmed content.

If you’d like to hear more from him, join us on Wednesday at 11am EST for an online discussion about advertising and the crowd invasion.

I often sit back (usually over coffee) and think about where crowdsourcing and collaboration are heading. It’s a fascinating exercise, coming up with different scenarios and expanding them out to see if and how it would work. My latest mental exploration has been about the concept of organizational crowdsourcing.

Most crowdsourcing is currently structured around the task, a production-oriented model. The community is given something to do and they do it. I want to design a logo. I want to analyze this data. I want to test this software. I want to provide customer support.

What if we expanded this into a process-oriented model where organizational structures in various forms move into the global community? For example, a structure (on the agency side) may look like this:

1. Project Owner(s) – Define the strategy to meet the project’s goals.
2. Project Manager(s) – Break down the strategy into specific steps and milestones. Assign particular tasks to various teams. Document the project’s status.
3. Team Leaders – Divide and delegate the team’s responsibilities to individual member types. Review requirements and submissions.
4. Team Members – Work on delegated task(s).

At each level, the work produced moves up and down the organizational chart for requirements, reviews, clarifications, etc. There also may or may not be an equivalent role on the client’s side, so the community would also step in to fill those gaps.

Now, I’m not proposing that members report to each other based on their overall job role like an employee to a manager, but base it on the specific role and project task. I don’t think anyone wants to transfer distracting political business environments onto the crowd, but what if we implement a process that enables a true strategy and delivery to be achieved through crowdsourcing?

I’m also not proposing that we broaden the scope of the tasks we give to the crowd. It’s been shown that crowdsourcing is more successful when the community is given smaller, more defined assignments instead of generalized broad goals. So thinking in terms of the organization, the tasks would just be defined for each particular role.

So how could this be implemented? I think a few things need to happen:

1. Members
Member types would no longer be defined by only skill set, but also by responsibility, experience, reliability and job role. This is also followed by more scrutiny and validation of these participants and less based on an open registration format.

2. Teams
Sub-groups of the community are created along with the infrastructure to handle the team dynamics. This is not an easy task. In-person teams tend to develop their own dynamics and virtual teams add another level of complexity. Include the third layer of the crowd and you have an interesting challenge.

3. Projects
The structuring of projects should be looked at with fresh eyes. Not in the fact that traditional project planning is ineffective. Just the opposite. Projects should be arranged into types or templates so their integrity is not at risk by putting them out to the crowd. Yes, every project is different, but how the community engages each project should be similar.

4. Clients
Clients would need to shift their mindset into understanding that not only the production tasks are done through the community, but strategy and planning as well. This may be more difficult to initially accept since some or all the ownership and direction of a project is resting with the crowd. Obviously the ultimate responsibility is still on the crowdsourcing firm and the client, but each project would have a certain level of crowd vs company engagement.

5. Communication
Communication between the community members at all levels as well as between the members and the company should be the utmost priority. An online environment would need to be created and nurtured that encourages this communication and openness. As with traditional structures, it’s an essential component to getting a project done successfully and maintaining a happy, productive work environment.

6. Technology
Web applications currently being used for competition, collaboration and communication would need to be upgraded to handle the more complex interactions between the individual members in all roles as well as inner-team and inter-team dynamics.

7. User Experience
The design and user interface, like technology, should also be updated to maintain and enhance the overall user experience of the competition, collaboration and communication. However, while the technology may get more complex, the user experience should become even simpler and more transparent. The users shouldn’t be aware of the increasing number of moving parts behind the scenes.

Of course, there are benefits and drawbacks to this idea as there are with all ideas. And it’s certainly a big leap from most organizational models, but I think it could be beneficial in some cases. What do you think? Should we expand the idea or go back to the drawing board? Call it a day or get more coffee?

Jason Spector is a creative and crowdsourcing consultant based in Pittsburgh, PA. He uses his extensive background in design, innovation and user experience to create a better crowd and a better world. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonSpector or read his blog at jasonspector.com.

Photo by: llawliet

Crowdsourcing has become one of those marketing buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot on blogs and in conference rooms. It’s the shiny new toy and everyone wants to play with it. That’s great, it is an exciting and potentially dynamic way to generate breakthrough ideas that will resonate with consumers. But the term is applied rather liberally to a wide variety of activities and executions.  Want a new logo for your brand? Crowdsource it! Want to engage consumers via a contest? That’s crowdsourcing!  Looking for new product innovations? That’s right, you guessed it, that’s crowdsourcing.

Now this is to be expected and comes with the territory. Until the marketing communications industry has had a couple more years to adjust to the opportunities that technology enables, crowdsourcing is going to be wielded more like a club than a scalpel. But hopefully agencies and brands will become more sophisticated and nuanced in their approach.

When a brand invites customers to produce content and receive something – money, recognition, prizes – in return, that’s not crowdsourcing, that’s a contest. We’ve been doing that for years.

When a brand puts out a call to action to the freelance creative community (amateurs and pros) to create a new 30 second TV spot, that’s not  crowdsourcing, that’s a cattle call.

We have the ability to harness the skills, experiences and intellect of virtually anyone on the planet and the best brands can come up with is, “Hey everybody, what should the new flavor of our fizzy sugar water be?”?  Ok, I guess, but this seems like a missed opportunity, and that’s why I advocate expertsourcing rather than crowdsourcing.

What is expertsourcing? Expertsourcing is a sub-category of crowdsourcing where the goal is to aggregate a wide range of individuals who are experts in their fields, rather than just a ‘come one, come all’ herd of people who have come to the party perhaps with nothing really worthwhile to contribute. Is there really much value in the 35^th, 70^th or 100^th extra logo concept that was just slapped together by someone with no training?

With expertsourcing you’re looking to get a group that ideally has little overlapping skills or knowledge. The more diverse the better, the more esoteric the better. For a brand, utilizing this sort of talent to create a new ad for beef jerky is a waste. You’ve got to think bigger. You have to challenge them with a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal).  Reinvent the education system; create a downtown with only bike traffic; create a better system of government!

Experts have a passion for causes and often have connections to experts from other fields. They are highly self-motivated the synergies created by having multiple experts often produces even greater results.  It’s time for brands to start thinking about trying to harness a school of sharks, rather than herd a flock of sheep.

Bio:

Rick Liebling is a marketing communications professional and brand consultant based in New York.  He recently published an eBook on crowdsourcing, Everyone Is Illuminated. You can follow him on Twitter @eyecube and read his blog at rickliebling.com