Is that something you’ve said, or heard said in your company?    We’ve heard it from many of our clients and potential clients, and doubtless, most of us have experiences with collaboration attempts that started out OK, but somehow, well, fizzled out.

For example, perhaps someone set up a wiki for a group project.   People probably started piling stuff into it, but quickly it became disorganized, and hard to find what you wanted, so it fell into disuse and people went back to the old email-blast collaboration technique.   Or perhaps you had an idea management tool that was designed to capture everyone’s new ideas whenever they had them.  But it was always unclear what, if anything, happened to the ideas, so again, people stopped using it.

We’ve heard all these stories and many more, and often get asked “how is crowdsourced collaboration different?”  The answer is in the process.  If you’ve followed Chaordix, or attended any of our webinar series, you know we believe strongly that the crowdsourcing model, or process, that is applied for a specific crowdsourcing objective is as important as, if not more important than, the technology that supports it.

Successful crowdsourcing is way more than just getting people to suggest ideas to a common online area.    It’s a well thought-out (ahead of time!) process where there are specific stages of idea submission, enhancement, and selection by the crowd, a panel, or combinations of both.   It requires having specific goals for the crowd to accomplish.  It involves communication mechanism that provide just the right amount of information to keep people in the loop and participating, without overwhelming them.  It incorporates incentives that make participating rewarding and fun.   And its also about making the goal, process and incentives transparent, so everyone knows how it’s going to work, how long it’s going to take and what the outcome is going to be.  It’s about getting the crowd to collaborate with a specific purpose in a specific period of time, with a technology platform and moderation that provide the essential ingredients.

Successful collaboration doesn’t happen by just bringing people together and saying “collaborate”.  Successful collaboration happens by good design, knowledgeable implementation and ongoing moderation/oversight.

And the best part is, it feeds on itself.  If you run a successful crowdsourcing engagement, and the crowd sees the progress and results,  the crowd members are that much more motivated to participate again, and again.

So, if you’ve tried collaboration technologies in the past and they haven’t worked out the way you thought they would, think about why they might have failed and think about the process used (or lack thereof).   But certainly, don’t assume that crowdsourcing is the same.    Crowdsourced collaboration, implemented correctly,  is truly different (and it works.)

Crowdsourced B-Roll

First up was “b-roll”: images & footage to be shown briefly, so that the entire video didn’t entirely consist of Nenshi addressing the camera. For a mayoral race in Calgary, iStockPhoto isn’t a bad choice (their headquarters being in Calgary), but iStock requires a release form to be signed by everyone in the photo frame. This would have meant no busy streets or crowded spaces in our video.

So we put out an open call to all  Nenshi campaign volunteers, describing the video’s timeline, and what types of b-roll would help make the video more dynamic.

Note that not every moment on the timeline called for a specific image, some were simply stating the topic being discussed by Nenshi, in hopes that a volunteer could find an appropriate image.

We weren’t expecting to receive b-roll for every topic, just a handful to give the video a more dynamic feel.  The volunteers provided far more than we could use, resulting in this feedback of an early edit of the campaign video:

Some folks think the sequence of images at 0:40, are too fast. Is it possible to slow it down, maybe remove every second image? -Nenshi

Sometimes having too much choice is as dangerous as too few choices!

Why was this exercise in crowdsourcing so successful?

Because we were looking for photos all around Calgary. Given the large pool of Nenshi volunteers, pretty much any Calgary landmark would have a Nenshi volunteer living next to it or walking past it. One volunteer even had access to a plane! (Look closely at 2:04.)

Just as programming can benefit from multiple participants (what is a challenge to you is obvious to someone else), volunteers gathered only the b-roll convenient for them and left distant landmarks to others.

What differentiated this exercise from simple “teamwork”, was our open call to action. We didn’t try coordinate who was collecting which b-roll. To delegate specific b-roll in advance would have meant less duplicated submissions, but also would have involved massive communications overhead.

Crowdsourcing benefits from spontaneity and flexibility. In the time b-roll delegation would have wasted from every volunteer, they could have all stepped outside, snapped their nearest landmark, and be done with it.

Nenshi’s platform video was released on August 12th, and currently is the most viewed mayoral candidate video. (Determined by performing a YouTube “Calgary Mayor” search, and sorting by “View Count”). Was it Nenshi’s detailed policy proposals? …or was it the crowdsourced b-roll?

Sadly, there is no way to answer that question, so we’ll just let our crowdsourcing process take all the credit!

…Except that The Google knows all. The moment when viewers are least likely to stop watching Nenshi’s video is when he’s speaking about Calgary’s City Council failure to address city contracts going over budget. No b-roll is shown at that moment.

Still… we’re keeping the crowdsourced b-roll.

Crowdsourced Close Captioning

YouTube is an amazing platform for supplementing video production. It allows videos to be uploaded “unlisted” so that it is excluded from any search results and playlists… the only people who are aware it exists are the creator, and whoever they decide to share the video’s URL with.

In this way a video can be shown to team members by sharing the URL to an email list or posted to a private forum. Everyone involved doesn’t need a YouTube account (as was YouTube’s older security model).

Another fantastic feature is Close Captioning… subtitles so that a video can be consumed by a deaf audience. YouTube assists in the creation of subtitles by offering a rough machine translation based on Google’s automated speech-to-text conversion. Of course the quality isn’t that great, so I corrected the mistakes by hand…

Still, Google has made the process vastly more efficient. Though the English may not be correct, the time-codes are. The creator does not need to identify when a word was spoken, only verify what that word was.

Providing an English transcription isn’t just a benefit to Calgary’s hearing impaired voters, it provides meaningful information to YouTube’s search engine. All of Naheed’s dialog is now indexed! So searching for “without needing lifetime subsidies” returns Nenshi’s platform video as a top result, even though that phrase was never entered into the video’s meta-data.

The existence of English captions probably spurred this exchange via YouTube comments:

To crowdsource language translation, a Google Docs Spreadsheet was created, containing (corrected) English transcription, and foreign language suggestions (1 tab per language):

Shown above are English, machine translated French, then human translated French. While we didn’t receive translations for every language we could think of (one user playfully began a “pirate translation”)…

…it certainly allowed for easy participation, and eliminated bottlenecks. In fact multiple volunteers could translate a single language simultaneously, since their changes were instantly visible to everyone else. Volunteer-A could start at the top, and Volunteer-B could start in the middle.

The get ‘er done nature of Nenshi’s campaign allowed independent AdWords campaigns to be launched, specifically targeting Calgarians who do not search the web using Canadian-English Google, and directing ad clickers to various non-English subtitled versions of the Nenshi Platform Video on YouTube, using URL parameters “hl” (language) and “cc_load_policy” (close captioning)…

www.youtube.com /v/89bzyRXK9nQ?hl=fr &cc_load_policy=1&autoplay=1 www.youtube.com /v/89bzyRXK9nQ?hl=ko &cc_load_policy=1&autoplay=1 www.youtube.com /v/89bzyRXK9nQ?hl=es &cc_load_policy=1&autoplay=1

Crowdsourcing extended into ad campaigns, with test ads being run independent of campaign headquarters (such as the pilot ads linking to non-English captioning). These ads had tiny spend, and were used to investigate the targeting of smaller target markets. Volunteers emailed successful campaign details to Nenshi HQ, which could then be rolled into the official ad campaign (and be given a larger spend). No coordination was needed from the top to initiate these investigations, since anyone can launch an AdWords, Facebook or Bing campaign. See a target market the campaign is overlooking? You want to help? Get ‘er done.

Lessons Learned

Acquiring b-roll saw greater participation, probably because everyone has access to a digital camera. And you know exactly what you’re getting with b-roll… if an image can’t be used, it is simply discarded.

Once translations started appearing for Nenshi’s platform video, volunteers who could only speak English (such as myself) weren’t sure how to gauge quality. I had made mistakes myself with the English captions, what were the chances a volunteer had done a perfect job translating the captions into another language? (Fortunately, it takes far less time to review a translation than to write one.)

And it became clear very quickly, this endeavor succeeded because Nenhi’s campaign consists of a large number of extremely motivated volunteers. My own broadcast requests for help outside of Nenshi’s volunteer channels resulted in minimal participation.

The campaign already had motivated volunteers who actively monitor Naheed’s posts via the campaign’s Facebook page, iPhone app, Twitter feed and email subscriptions. Given such a “crowd”, it wasn’t hard to find simple mechanisms to allow crowdsourced participation.

Crowdsourcing isn’t the future of political campaigning. It’s already here. In 2008, Obama’s campaign used an iPhone app to help facilitate phone and street canvasing. That enabled volunteers to be spontaneous with their canvassing.

In a new neighborhood? Got a spare moment? Here’s who you can visit nearby, and who you can call!

Such open calls to action will never replace traditional campaigning… there will always be phone banks of volunteers, organized funding drives and… stock photography. But the dynamic nature of crowdsource participation models allow volunteers to leverage their unique assets and skills, instead of having to communicate those skills to the campaign headquarters, and waiting (hoping) to be assigned a task which best leverages those skills.

And that makes volunteering more fun.

Out at the GROW2010 conference in Vancouver (not to be confused with grow events of the horticulture variety), we got to hear from Lane Becker, Co-founder and VP Strategy of Get Satisfaction talked about “well that didn’t work – startup lessons learned.”

He talked about Adaptive Path, MeasureMap (acquired by Google … Inspired GoogleAnalytics), and Get Satisfaction all with cheery cynicism.

Get Satisfaction is a peer to us – as Lane described they offer “Customer service communities online – getting customers to engage with and support each other.” Chaordix has a different focus on innovation and insight communities. Our members through crowdsourcing are collaborating with each other, but also with the company personally and via our moderation team. We generate innovation and insight for companies, where Get Satisfaction offloads work from companies, reducing customer support costs.

Early on we looked at Get Satisfaction and thought “great idea but that won’t work.” Why? Because it’s not a one way input world anymore and people contributing online expect more sometimes useful help from a non-invested stranger. They want connection, appreciation, and a near real-time response from the company on the feedback shared. Participation is the new brand loyalty.

Ta da! Turns out Get Satisfaction came to same conclusion. Now they bundle in moderation to their service.

There’s a lot we’ll all discover as online communities mature. At Chaordix we’re working hard to create the human and online expeience to trigger product co-creation, technology or research breakthroughs, open up new markets and predict future opportiny for world-leading brands we work with.

What do you think human behaviour tells us so far about how people participate and invent online, and what companies find most valuable about customer and other crowd input?

We weren’t really sure of the difference either, so we consulted Wikipedia. We learned that co-creation could be seen as creating great work by standing together with those for whom the project is intended. Scholars C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy introduced the idea of co-creation in their 2000 Harvard Business Review article, “Co-Opting Customer Competence”. They developed their arguments further in their book The Future of Competition.

Last year, Promise Corporation published the results of a systematic review of co-creation evidence, Co-creation: new pathways to value that was co-produced with LSE Enterprise. In it they attempted to distinguish co-creation from related concepts such as crowdsourcing, mass customisation and mass collaboration by insisting on the psychoanalytical, decision-making as well as innovation roots of the concept in its intellectual evolution. Their new definition of co-creation: “co-creation is an active, creative and social process, based on collaboration between producers and users, that is initiated by the firm to generate value for customers.”

Is there a difference between crowdsourcing, open innovation, mass collaboration and co-creation? We hate to be the ones that let the cat out of the bag, but not really. Some people are more comfortable with one term over another. We think it comes down to who’s book you’ll buy.

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.