@liman from SAP joined @shelleykuipers for the day at CrowdConf (Chaordix had a panel slot and sponsored the event)

The planned keynote was Jeff Howe @crowdsourcing but he unfortunately missed the event – Lukas Biewald (CEO, CrowdFlower) @l2k from @CrowdFlower did a great job of kicking off with Leila C. Janah (CEO, Samasource), who spoke of the opportunity to “tap 4 billion global super computers in developing and underdeveloped regions.” Crowdflower said their crowd members earn 5X the average wage through their community.

Liveops, CEO Maynard Webb was next on stage… “we are just at the beginning, only 4% of commerce happens online…work is the next killer app”. Webb shared some interesting stats: 22% of employers can’t find the right resources, even with 9.6% unemployed. 30% of employable workforce are working on their own terms as freelancers. Somewhat shocking was the research finding that most high school students do not expect to work for a corporation. Recommended read – “The Future Arrived Yesterday.” Maynard shared his view on the new rules of engagement – meritocracy, transparency and accountability.

1st panel – Possible vs. Impossible: Determining the Power of Crowdsourcing moderated by Dan Scholnick (Principal, Trinity Ventures). In talking about challenges, Barney Pell (Partner, Search Strategist and Evangelist, Microsoft) said what’s not quite nailed is demonstrating the benefits of learning and the incentives to make it happen – need to integrate for the big win. Today, the learning curve presents a problem – people gain mastery over time, then grow bored and move on to something else. Successful organizations may be the ones who excel at getting members of the crowd to share their knowledge before leaving for the next level task, enabling the crowd to advance up the learning curve. Sharon Chiarella (VP, Amazon Mechanical Turk) noted that transition from outsourcing to crowdsourcing is a challenge for organizations that don’t know their workers – geographically and politically. Loved when Ville Miettinen (CEO, Microtask) talked about our role as practitioners is ‘collective evangelism’. Leila Janah said the biggest challenge is that organizations aren’t looking to buy crowdsourcing but rather the output and power of the crowd…we need more LiveOps – where people can earn a real living — where they live. Martijn Lampert (Research Director, Motivaction International) said the real opportunity is when micro networks can self organize on the available platforms.

Wolfgang Kitza (CEO, Clickworker.com) shared with us Crowdsourcing in Europe.

Okay, now onto the super smart researchers…

John Horton (Harvard), spoke about the challenge of finding a fair price for work, when work can be done anywhere and wages differ greatly within each geography. How does a single buyer negotiate price in a microtask context, when there are many workers? Mass haggling is challenging. The solution? The Hagglebot — simplified bargaining using Algorithmic Wage Negotiations. (we’ve asked him for a blog post! )

Adam Kapelner (University of Pennsylvania) and Dana Chandler (MIT) presented their findings in “Preventing Satisficing in Online Surveys” said surveys of the future must increase perceived value, force a slow down of information/questions and attract attention to what’s needed. An interesting finding is: for best survey results, target women 25 years and older – you will get lots of feedback!

Lauren Schmidt (Headlamp Research) spoke about “Crowdsourcing for Human Subjects Research” the need to make policies clear, provide participant anonymity, provide ethical compensation, protect vulnerable populations, offering fair compensation, not to cross the line into coercion were some of the through-provoking topics she introduced.

Next up was David Alan Grier, Author of “When Computers Were Human” David’s presentation is a must watch. Social aspiration is a powerful force — everyone wants to be recognized as special. He shared what it takes to get a crowd to work — well.

2nd Panel - Make it work: Big ideas and great successes moderated by Ethan Kurzweil (Bessemer Ventures) (BTW, did you know that Ray Kurzweil’s movie, “The Singularity is Near“ - is touring the globe?). Brian Goler (VP, Marketing oDesk) discussed strategies for tapping global talent, making work transparent, the importance of building long term relationships, and the impact of guaranteeing payment. The formula? Seed (micro marketplaces of skill sets), feed (PHP developers, etc.), and weed (programs and policies). Doron Reuveni (CEO, uTest) discussed how they maintain quality with a crowd of 30k testers by building a community to test their own software as they were developing it. Expert software testers from around the world are now engaged. Each gets a profile, and uTest on-ramps them by helping them build their rating up in a way that is visible and makes potential customers confident that the tester has the skills they need. He spoke of the need to ensure incentives are aligned with the direction you want to go. How to compensate a team that works together to accomplish a goal vs. each individual? Fabio Rosati (CEO, Elance) has been crowdsourcing since 2001. The 1998 paper “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy“, discussed the devolution of the large corporation into “flexible, temporary networks of individuals” – amazing that this trend was already visible over 10 years ago. As an early entrant, Elance had to educate potential buyers to get them comfortable hiring online. With a useful and easy UX, and great perseverance, earnings have now topped the $300m mark. Wyatt Nordstrom (CEO, Maven Research) get high quality people into the fold by building friction into the hiring process, and having this challenge serve as the litmus test for joining. By passing the “test,” uTest learns something about them. They continuously refine their understanding of their population to understand micro communities – 50 measures plus feedback. Patrick McKenna (CEO, Keniks) spoke of 3 types of crowdsourcing: transactional, relational and creative. Shared his “formula” – (1) find a pile of cash with transactional tasks. (2) understand how you add vale to the transaction – lowering cost, increasing quality, increasing the speed of answers, (3) build a process that leverages the crowd and an interface that enables the crowd to optimize the transaction.

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor, Harvard provided a fascinating and often hilarious perspective as he talked about “Minds for Sale“. This talk was the best-in-show at CrowdConf. In his view, we are all treading into ‘illegal’ employment law territory – though he encouraged us to drive on and keep innovating. The generative enterprise is now running on the crowdsourced operating system. How might we match the marginal time of people who are passionate about the work potential employers are trying to crowdsource? How much context do we disclose for micro tasks? What the task is for may be important – e.g., might someone use mechanical Turk for bomb making? What is the impact of pseudonyms? And what about the implications to do with the form of payment? Will this result in a tax on virtual currency? He sees more crowdsourcing in civic realms next. Flash mobs for protests, anyone?

3rd Panel – Distributed Creativity: The Softer Skills of Human Intelligence moderated by Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-hour Work Week) new friends, Jason Aiken (Community Director, 99 Designs) spoke of the need to be sensitive to personal interests in crowdsourcing design work, and creating a climate where designers wouldn’t be giving away their work on spec. John Winsor (CEO, Victors & Spoils) thinks the next big thing in crowdsourcing is reliable reputation information for individuals and teams. Keith Kegley (VP, X Prize Foundation) spoke of the shift to designing systems for addressing systemic problems vs. designing things. Saad Khan (Partner, CMEA Capital) is interested in moving from crowd sourcing to crowd action. Chaordix CEO Shelley Kuipers shared cool projects they are doing in collaboration with Orange for mobile activism and Oxford for maternal health.

Some thought provoking questions:

• “If you had 10,000 people, what would you use them for?”
• “How might we make work look and feel more like gaming to incent behaviors we want?
• “How do you find people with fresh perspectives that are orthogonal to problem space?” (critical for new innovation spaces, like those of the X Prize)
• “How does crowdsourcing fit into the global economy?”

Thanks to CrowdFlower for an amazing conference, we look forward to participating again next year!

Is it true? Do I understand it? Is it data I can apply to perform better, right now?

Turns out crowdsourcing has a lot in common with information governance.

This week at a beautiful desert oasis in New Mexico, Chaordix participated on IBM’s Data Governance Council Forum to work on strengthening and modernizing the Maturity Model that sets out best practices for information governance that distinguish leading organizations. Among an elite of IT, governance and finance professionals for some of the world’s largest organizations in health, banking, utility sector and the US Army, I began feeling an outsider to the scope and scale of information management challenges that these organizations face.

But when asked what they wanted to talk about, it turned out their top 3 interests were the same as top concerns enterprises have about data that is…crowdsourced!

Crowdsourced data can pose some interesting governance challenges. For example, how to ensure semantic consistency: how can we get people from all different groups (think IT, engineering, finance…), with different first languages, and different cultures talking in a way we understand? Can we structure it to make it work and analyze it to make sense of it?

At Chaordix this comes up frequently, especially working with global organizations and when moving from closed-end surveying where answers are constrained, to crowdsourcing where people can submit freeform answers and comments. We of course apply crowdsourcing models and processes to make input meaningful and useful, but also want people to behave as they do – inconsistently! Absolute control comes at a cost of potential innovation and learning from your employees, consumers, partners or public. While we have some tools today, we are constantly looking for better analysis methods to identify patterns in language, mark interest clusters with tagging, and make it all easy to mine with search.

Data out of Chaordix is relied on to identify which product will sell most, which action will yield the most brand loyalty, which R&D answer is the right one and more. Crowdsourcing is catching on precisely for the reason that it lets more than a few internal experts guess at best outcomes. It lets a diverse and qualified group have a say, often those very people who will actually use a product. When we can help enterprises attract a diverse and qualified crowd, their volume response yields wisdom of the crowd.

We’re working hard on extracting ever better insight from crowdsourced data and if you follow us we’d love your thoughts. Our projects generate copious amounts of raw data to mine. Here are some of the latest we’ve focused on recently: co-created products ( see Mobile Volunteering), answers to difficult to solve problems (Global Voices for Maternal Health), and even policy innovation (see winners discovered Canada’s Digital Compass ).

Thanks to Steven Adler for inviting us to be part of the Smart Governance forum in Tamaya NM and for continuing to inspire leadership in information management. Take a look at IBM’s latest step to shift open – www.infogovcommunity.com.

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?

This past week Chaordix was represented at the WorldBlu 2010 Awards in Vegas.

The event was to honour those who made the 2010 list (we did ) and to hear first hand stories amongst the honourees about what makes their company democratic. A complete list of the companies that made the 2010 WorldBlu list is available here

To compete for a spot on the WorldBlu list, your company – in fact our entire team – completed a survey on how we performed against The WorldBlu 10 Principles of Organizational Democracy

1. Purpose and Vision
2. Transparency
3. Dialogue + Listening
4. Fairness + Dignity
5. Accountability
6. Individual + Collective
7. Choice
8. Integrity
9. Decentralization
10. Reflection + Evaluation

This is a daunting list of principles to live by.

The event day ended with a keynote from Tony Hsieh, Author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose and CEO, Zappos.com.

My favourite quote of the day was from Tony Hsieh:

core values, have them, commit to them – hire by them and fire by them.

I was inspired by what I heard… and to be honest it made me realize that even at Chaordix as an awardee, where through our crowdsourcing solution we enable democratization in the workplace, we ourselves…have much work to do to become more democratic.

So Team Chaordix – what are our core values?

Team WorldBlu – Traci, Miranda & Sam – thanks for including us, we’ll be back next year!

Remember when email first hit the scene and was feared as an unruly and lawless tool to propagate information chaos and over-disclosure? Well I discovered those same fears are conjured by today’s social tools and crowdsourcing among major enterprises while at an IBM conference on data governance in New Platz, NY.

First, a big thank you to IBM & Steven Adler for the invitation to participate and contribute.  The conference was at Mohonk – an amazing location for such a thoughtful retreat, and I spent the entire time surrounded by IBM customers and partners.

There were two tracks to the conference ‘Data Assets & Risks’ and ‘Governance & Compliance.’ I joined Mark Oestreicher of Harper Collins, Bobby John of Brainpark, Gerry Katz of Citigroup, Megan Murray of Booz Allen Hamilton on a panel to discuss Enterprise 2.0 and Self Governance, which was moderated by Traci Fenton of WorldBlu.  Each panelist presented our thoughts on data governance and how it relates to Enterprise 2.0 and this whole concept of self governance. Followed by tough questions from the corporate crowd!  I introduced the concept of crowdsourcing for enterprises to discuss how freely data (including profile data) is submitted in crowdsourcing communities today where members are contributing ideas, research breakthroughs, and other answers to needs that businesses broadcast for solution.

The pervasive audience response to my pitch on the upside of data openness was, “No thanks, at least not yet.” I discovered that among major enterprises in attendance, there is still much work to be done to get social tools well understood and adopted. There seems to be an inherent need to heavily manage user behavior inside these companies via locked down systems and strict data governance. Corporations do not yet have confidence in the tools for fear of compromising confidential and proprietary data.  We had these same discussions when email was introduced to the corporations years ago… humans will be humans, and if someone wants to expose private information, they will regardless of the systems in place.

While enterprise cautiousness is real, so is their curiosity, and I welcomed many great conversations one-on-one with the crowd. More discussions to come! And I look forward to heading back to the next IBM conference with case studies under my arm.

First, open your kimono

The Xprize incentive 2 innovate conference was this week in New York, with Don Tapscott and Reid Hoffman among the speakers. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble as well as well as Unicef, USAID and the US Department of Energy were in attendance – all looking to better understand the future of open innovation and how to apply it as leaders.

We sent Claudia Moore, our VP of Marketing, to check it out and report back to us. First, she mentioned how the location set the tone of the conference. Being at the UN would be a pretty cool experience. Below are some standout points from the conference that really resonated with me.

So what does it take to create an open innovation culture? Reid Hoffman emphasized the need for tolerance of failure (learn and play again) and leaders walking the talk. Martin de Beer of Cisco emphasized the need to tie people’s compensation to innovation. And Judy Estrin called for leaders to translate the issues our companies faces into challenges for all employees to help solve.

Crowdsourcing done well follows all of the principles of open innovation: transparency, embracing failure en route to answers, rewarding innovative acts, fostering critical thinking, connecting people and breaking down hierarchy.

The ingredient for an open innovation culture that had us saying “huh” came up in the conference’s opening remarks by Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone.” He looked out at attendees sitting in the not-so-casual UN and said “nothing innovative can come out of this if you don’t loosen up… if you don’t open up.”

That got us recognizing that crowdsourcing is also a modern means to foster trust.

Crowdsourcing online makes it comfortable for more than the few outgoing, comfortable-in-the-boss’s offices, group talker types to chime in. Crowdsourcing within organizations like Intel, Procter & Gamble, Cisco, British Telecom and Dell have all proven that online open innovation draws a bigger crowd of employee contributors than traditional group brainstorms, or other big-think meetings. The preference to type versus talk shocked cell phone companies when they first launched texting and noticed demand quickly overtake voice use. It’s simply more comfortable to contribute online than it is to contribute live and in person. (In fact even at the conference, discussion on Twitter was more thought-provoking than the live break out sessions, search twitter with the hashtag i2i to see for yourself).

So crowdsourcing is enabling a trust shift. Great leaders know the critical questions to ask. Great leadership comes from trusting employees to contribute innovative answers.

Photo by Martin Haesemeyer