chaordix

New Kid on the Crowdsourcing Block

Brooke Campbell on January 26, 2010 in Employee Thoughts

As one of the newest members to join the Chaordix team, I’m pretty excited to be a) joining such an innovative team and b) writing my very first blog – I know, I know, welcome to 1999, population: me

Also, I’m also pretty thrilled to be entering the realm of Crowdsourcing – which is totally new to me, and what a cool environment to soak it all in. Here are two things I really like about Chaordix:

1.) How many companies let ALL their employees do their own blog entries, on topics of their choice? It’s nice to work in a place where all different perspectives are valued.

2.) Random facts…I’ve never worked at a company where people know so many random facts. We could play a great game of Trivial Pursuit.

Over the past few weeks, I have come across some resources (internally and externally) that have helped me wrap my head around what exactly “crowdsourcing” (also referred to by many as “open innovation”) is, and how companies are finding great success through calls to a group of contributors (a crowd) asking for their input.

I thought it might be helpful to share a couple of the discoveries I’ve had along the way – for any other “newbies” out there – just starting to grasp this concept.

Not to brag or anything, but our Chaordix website has tons of great resources. Check out the case studies…here you’ll find some examples of how well-known companies have used crowdsourcing, and provides a useful breakdown of their purpose, call, model, incentives, promotion and more. You’ll also learn how we’ve ranked these initiatives based on the elements mentioned above. I found these interesting and useful!

I’ll be writing more case studies and as I was researching, I came across a little company you might have heard of…Pepsi, and their project, the Pepsi Refresh Project. It’s a pretty great reference in terms of the end user’s perspective. Enjoy!

Chaordix relies on crowds to strengthen our business too! Whether you are familiar with crowdsourcing or looking to contribute by joining an innovative team, Chaordix offers great opportunities for people looking to be part of something cool.

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Zen Coding – Lightspeed Ahead

Colin Sproule on January 5, 2010 in Employee Thoughts

zen-coding

I made a New Years resolution to give the Zen Coding plugin a try in an attempt to speed up html/css markup. We do a lot of in browser design and prototyping with markup at Chaordix so any increase in efficiency is a boon.

Zen Coding was created by Sergey Chikuyonok to allow elegant css style syntax for quickly constructing html and css markup. Before I go any further let me demonstrate what constructing a chunk of html with Zen Coding looks like.

ul#my-list>li.item-$*3>a

Zen Coding takes the above line and transforms it into this:

<ul id="my-list">
  <li class="item-1"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-2"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-3"><a></a></li>
</ul>

Okay, so that was pretty cool but anyone who writes code everyday can probably pump that out with a serious of shortcuts in their editor of choice. Let’s go overboard a little and show some power.

html:xt>div#container>div#header>div#logo+ul#nav>li.item-$*5>a

magically becomes:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
  <head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="container">
      <div id="header">
        <div id="logo"></div>
        <ul id="nav">
          <li class="item-1"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-2"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-3"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-4"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-5"><a href=""></a></li>
        </ul>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
  </html>

The input to output ratio is huge. While impressive it’s really only useful if the syntax is easy to learn and construct. In my experience the learning curve has been steep and I was up and running in no time. Let’s walk through the syntax for the first example in this post to demonstrate how simple it really is.

ul#my-list>li.item-$*3>a

We can break this down very easily. Let’s start with how the list and it’s list items are created.

ul#my-list

becomes

<ul id="my-list"></ul>

and

li.item

becomes

<li class="item"></li>

At this point things should feel pretty familiar to writing CSS. let’s add some of the fun stuff.

ul#my-list>li.item*3

    <ul id="my-list">
      <li class="item"></li>
      <li class="item"></li>
      <li class="item"></li>
    </ul>

Using > we are have specified that the list items are inside the unordered list. We’ve then tacked *3 onto the list items telling Zen coding to multiply the number by three. Now let’s finish it off.

ul#my-list>li.item-$*3>a

<ul id="my-list">
  <li class="item-1"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-2"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-3"><a></a></li>
</ul>

We have now used -$ to increase the number on the class name of each list item and used > again to specify a link inside each of these list items.

Alright, reading through that it may feel like a lot of mental math just to output some HTML but once you get started it’s easy and dare I say addictive. Once you get the hang of it you’ll be coding at warp speed!

Zen Coding supports a number of text editors and includes plugins for both HTML and CSS.

Checkout these links if you want to Learn more about Zen Coding:

photo by H. Koppdelaney

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2009, it’s a wrap!

Shelley Kuipers on December 22, 2009 in News & Reviews
To all those following and supporting us at Chaordix – thank you for a great year! In just a short period of time we’ve emerged as the market leader in crowdsourcing thought leadership, proven methodologies and enabling technology! The conversations and projects we’ve had an opportunity to work on have been rewarding and inspiring to all of us here on the Chaordix team.

We continue to innovate in fostering crowd contribution of collective intelligence (wisdom) and crowd production (tasks performed by your crowd) by providing technology, crowd recruitment, moderation and crowdsourcing planning know how to clients. We’ve heard repeatedly that our vision for Crowdsourcing for the organization – whether an enterprise, non-profit, government or academic – is the right one, we believe it too. We are excited to be living out this vision with each of you.

The foundation of our belief system and what crowdsourcing affords each organization – distributed power, diversity and ingenuity – comes from the visionary founder of Visa, Dee Hock. He imagined & built an organization that could find the right balance of chaos and order.

What’s on our roadmap for 2010:
- Crowdsourcing gone multi – equipping organizations for multiple outputs (ideas, R&D answers, visuals and video) via multiple crowdsourcing models (contest, collaborative, panel led) will remain core to the value of Chaordix™ products
- The future is mobile – watch for news on our strategy in 2010
- Localization – with our recent partner announcements in the Netherlands, France, Italy – we recognize that crowdsourcing in each of these markets requires specific cultural and language knowledge. Be watching for more announcements coming in the new year including South America, Asia and Europe.
- Our very own crowdsourcing – yep, we’ve done lots of it with our inaugural community cambrianhouse.com and others, we’ll be starting more crowdsourcing communities in 2010, including our own.
What are we most proud of? The opportunity to change the world for the better – from inventive and collaborative enterprise or community, to a non-profit making an impact locally or globally, governments that are accountable & transparent with their citizens, to academic institutions that invest in new solutions for a sustainable, safe planet. All of these are examples of successful crowdsourcing and we believe every worthy organization is or will be building their very own crowdsourcing strategy in the very near future.

From all of us at Chaordix – best wishes for the holiday season!

We look forward to an exciting 2010 with all of you – our customers, partners, collaborators and followers.

Team Chaordix
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Crowdsourcing expanding globally like McDonalds at its peak – well almost

Claudia Moore on November 13, 2009 in News & Reviews

So many high profile crowdsourcing initiatives happen in North America, you might imagine that the movement is a western thing, or a mostly American thing. Not so. Just like crowdsourcing can’t be pigeon-holed into a single purpose like finding research or tech solutions, or task production, or only uncovering product or service ideas – it’s also not a single continent thing.

In the last month, we’ve announced two European partnerships. Our latest alliance is with InnoCrowding Group. They’re a leading service provider in crowd-based innovation in Europe, with particular strength in Italy.

Many of the government organizations, corporations, universities and civic groups that come to us are from across Europe, Latin America, and other regions. They are looking to draw wisdom, production or funding from crowds of employees, partners, or the public, often in languages other than English, with crowdsourcing models that are more collaborative and community-centric than commonplace in North America.

We are choosing allies who can assist not just in translation, but localization with different cultures so we continue to get right how to engage participants, motivate them with incentives and rewards, and enable collaboration that fosters human connections and productivity. We have lots to learn about crowd behaviours abroad and, with our partners, we’re up for it.

What do you see as the vitals to making crowdsourcing work anywhere? Will participation be driven by mobile access, rise in social online behaviours, governments’ investment in leading innovation? Share your thoughts.

Photo by: Jomama

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Demystifying health care legislation through crowdsourcing

Randy Corke on September 10, 2009 in News & Reviews

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?

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