Open Technologist

Crowdsourcing Platforms

A crowdsourcing platform allows a organization to collaborate with a community to provide solutions to a project. When organizations decide on crowdsourcing a project they can either attempt to attract the crowd themselves, creating their own platform in the process, or make use of an existing crowdsourcing platform with an established community. The main difference is that an exisiting platorm will have an established community. Opting to create your own platform will require investment in...

Crowdsourcing Books

Below is a list of great books covering the topic of crowdsourcing. Click on the images for further info.   Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything          Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business       We-Think         Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations      The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) ...

Facebook’s Crowdsourcing Translation Reward System

Last year Facebook turned to crowdsourcing to translate Facebook into other languages with great success. Latest statistics provided by Facebook show that over 300,000 people have since participated in the translation process making Facebook available in more than 70 languages. Facebook have now launched a system that rewards translators who will receive special icons when they reach certain milestones in the Translation application in order to highlight recognition. The awards are grouped...

Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion

Last year I blogged about the Charter for Compassion, the TED prize wish of Karen Armstrong. The aim of the Charter for Compassion was to build a peaceful and congruent world by bringing together the voices of people from all religions and highlight that all faiths share the principle of compassion. An open call was made for people from different faiths to contribute to the charter. This open call and collaborative effort drew upon  thousands of people from over 100 countries in a six...

Crowdsourcing Example – People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsourcing is a topic that has gained popularity in the last few years with companies such as InnoCentive, CrowdSpring and Amazon Mechanical Turk providing platforms for companies to engage with community members to provide innovative solutions which is why I have decided that crowdsourcing will be my topic for “My half time pep talk for 2009". Crowdsourcing as defined by Jeff Howe is “the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it...

5 Crowdsourcing Websites

Crowdsourcing is a business practice that has become popular in the last few years. Since the term was coined by Jeff Howe author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business a number of valuable resources have appeared on the net. Below is a list of websites that provide valuable information about crowdsourcing that I regularly scan: Crowdsourcing - Jeff Howe - Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" and published a book about the topic. The blog covers...

Crowdsourcing Definition by Jeff Howe

A while back I blogged about how Facebook used crowdsourcing to translate Facebook into other languages and mentioned that the term "crowdsourcing" was coined by Jeff Howe author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. I recently came accross this video from Jeff giving a brief overview of what crowdsourcing is...

Al Jazeera’s Creative Commons Repository For TV

The Al Jazeera Network has released video footage under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license as part of its creative commons repository. According to the conditions of the license you are allowed to copy, distribute and adapt the work as long as the work is attributed as specified by the licensor but does not reflect that they endorse your use of the work. The repository currently only has footage of the War in Gaza. Al Jazeera asserts that they are the first news broadcaster...

Crowdsourcing Example – Ushahidi

Ushahidi ("testimony'' in Swahili") is a platform that users crowdsourcing to gather information during a time of crisis. Anybody can submit information during a crisis via mobile phone, email or the website which will then be mapped and a timeline provided. It was initially started to map reports about the violence in Kenya after the election in 2008. The platform which is open source is being built and will cater for plug-ins and extensions so that it can be customised for different needs...

Crowdsourcing Example – Facebook Crowdsourcing for Translations

Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Jeff Howe who described it as an open call by a company to a large group of individuals who are invited to partake in a task that would under traditional circumstances be performed by employees of the company. Facebook with its worldwide user-base has turned to crowdsourcing to translate Facebook into other languages such as German, French and Spanish amongst others. An application is used to translate bits of the site which is then voted upon by other users...