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 attracting and establishing a community. Examples of crowdsourcing platforms include:

• InnoCentive

A platform with a community of over 200,000 members. InnCentive posts a wide range of problems from organizations in  areas such as engineering, computer science, chemistry, life sciences and business

• TopCoder

A platform with a community of over 247, 000 members. TopCoder posts computer programming problems from organizations in the form of competitions. The community are then asked to design, develop and test the software developed in the competitions. More information can be found here.

• Amazon Mechanical Turk

• A platform with a community of over 100, 000 members. Allows anybody to post tasks that need to be completed like writing product descriptions or finding broken links on a website.

Deciding on whether to create your own platform or use an existing platform depends on the circumstance. Although creating your own platform will require advertising in attracting people to be apart of the community it also means you will have exclusive use of the community. Pepsi did this with a campaign that allowed people to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners received a $10,000 prize with their design been featured on Pepsi cans. This was also seen as a marketing campaign by Pepsi.

Opting to make use of existing platform means that you have an established community so the chances of reaching a wide audience are likely. These platforms have experience in running successful crowdsourcing projects so there is no experimenting on trying to make the project succeed.

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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)

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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 in three categories:

• Voting Participation
• Words Published
• Translations Published

The are also various levels for the categories which are based on frequency and accuracy with regard to translating words and voting for the best translation.

A common mistake that companies make when opting for a crowdsourcing model to complete a project is that they forget to provide a rewards system. In a previous blog post “People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms” I highlighted direct and indirect benefits of crowdsourcing for the community that are essential to the model’s success. Facebook have provided a key indirect benefit which is recognition amongst peers. Facebook’s success with this crowdsourcing project will continue to evolve and with its ever expanding userbase which has now exceeded 350 million users. Could Facebook be offering rewards via financial compensation next?

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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 week period. Over 150 000 visitors commented on the submissions. The Council of Conscience then sorted through the contributions in order to complete the charter. The charter has been released and can viewed on the Charter for Compassion website.

The website also provides various resources to learn about other faiths and spread the word about the charter. There are various talks on compassion that can be viewed and there are various ways to participate online and offline. Now that the charter has been completed a key element is to spread the word about the charter, so participate by finding different ways to do this on the Charter for Compassion website. A video about the Charter can be viewed below.

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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 to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call”.

If a company needs a product designed they would define the requirements and have an open call for solutions. The best solution is selected with the winner usually receiving a reward, which is often in the form of financial compensation.

It is important to note that for a particular crowdsourcing project multiple submissions are received and the best one chosen with the rest being tossed aside. Are those that submit solutions that are being tossed aside being exploited? They get nothing in return. For the company partaking in a crowdsourcing initiative they get the to select the best and only pay for what they want or deem reputable. A key factor for these platforms to succeed is to continually grow their community base and encourage those that are not successful to try again in other crowdsourcing projects. One of these platforms, TopCoder, has implemented a model that has benefits for both those that win and those that do not.

Developing software often requires hiring software developers to develop software in order to achieve business goals. Software projects are infamous for late delivery and high costs. A company rectifying this impression on the software industry is TopCoder.

TopCoder is a software development house for outsourced projects. What separates TopCoder from its competitors is that the work is crowdsourced to a community of over 180 000 members from over 200 countries in a competition format.

Once a client approaches TopCoder a formal software methodology is used. TopCoder together with the client gathers the requirements. The project is then broken up into modules. TopCoder then evaluates if these modules exist in their module catalogue from previous competitions. If so, there is no need to develop the software again. The community of software developers are then requested to design and develop each module in a competition format. Each module has a set time period that it has to be completed within and the best solution wins a financial prize. The community then assembles the modules into the final project. There are also bug races during the testing phase that is crowdsourced to the community.

The software components developed by the community (in the component catalogue) are licensed with members who developed them earning royalties from the sales. Developers are given feedback from a review board for every submission. TopCoder provides this in the form of detailed ratings and performance metrics are kept to track a developers standing within the community and includes skill ratings and history of submissions. TopCoder also acts as a recruitment centre where companies can find the best software developers from around the world. This week Facebook announced that they were becoming a TopCoder sponsor. The metrics provided by TopCoder acts as a performance measure as to where strengths and weaknesses of the developers are.

It is key for these companies who provide crowdsourcing platforms to continually grow its community base. The challenge is keeping those who try and do not succeed satisfied so that they come back. The benefits to people who partake in TopCoder projects can be classified in two categories; Direct and Indirect.

Direct benefits include:

• Financial compensation for winners
• Financial compensation for members who do not win but do place highly

Indirect benefits include:

• Members get to see how winners solved a problem and therefore pick up new techniques
• Components allow community members to work on parts of a project where they want to and where their areas of expertise can be utilised
• Feedback is given whereby developers are told where they need to improve
• Peer recognition is provided via developer ratings which are publicly available

Indirect benefits provide members with a view that their time spent on these projects is an investment that could yield future rewards. The TopCoder platform provides members with a chance to show their capabilities and provides a platform to self-market one. This provides an opportunity for companies to see whom they can employ. TopCoder provides feedback on the quality of their work and shows members that people are using their contribution, which spurs participants to pursue perfection.

In the case of TopCoder the company provides more than just benefits to those that win. They have managed to cater for the entire community. In order for these crowdsourcing platforms to succeed their community members will have to have a reason to continually comeback to partake in crowdsourcing initiatives. Financial compensation to a minority will not be enough and indirect benefits have to be provided.

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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 his insights about crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing Examples Wiki – A wiki started by Anjali Ramachandran with over 135 companies listed making use of crowdsourcing
• Business Exchange – A website that acts as a aggregator for a wide array of topics including crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing Directory - The CrowdsourcingDirectory keeps readers aware of news from the world of crowdsourcing
• Open Innovation -The aim of Open Innovators is to bring new insights about a variety of topics including open innovation, crowdsourcing, and co-creation

For a list of crowdsourcing platforms click here for further information.

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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 about.

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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 to release video footage under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’. According to a Herald Tribune article Al Jazeera are trying to break into the American market by using the Internet as medium. By allowing anybody to take their footage including rivals to copy, mix, and distribute it they are creating a platform for themselves to achieve this goal. Bloggers will be able to show video without worrying about copyright licenses prohibiting it.

Al Jazeera are counting on others to distribute their news reports and the success of the repository depends on other people distributing their work. They are are attracting uniquely qualified minds on a global scale in order to partake in solving a problem; distribute their video footage. This certainly has elements of crowdsourcing and has benefits for Al Jazeera like creating a presence to draw viewers to their channel, and more importantly, in this case, a different perspective of the War in Gaza. This also has benefits for the uniquely qualified minds as they will have access to high quality video footage to copy, mix and distribute.

I certainly hope Al Jazeera expands their repository to other topics and news stories that they broadcast to reach a wider audience.I have seen many videos been pulled off video sharing sites with the broadcasters resisting video sharing. Al Jazeer’s approach of embracing their audience could lead the way for a new era in broadcasting.  Other broadcasters will surely be watching to see if this project becomes a success. The question remains, will it be to late for them to play catch up? Below is a news report available in the repository.

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 and locations. The community has just released an alpha version and can be viewed by the public. It includes the following features according to Ushahidi’s blog:

Creating new crisis reports tagged by location

Adding images, video and news links to reports also tagged by location

Visualizing reports using an interactive timeline and heatmaps

Allowing users to participate by adding information to reported events

Credibility/Ranking of reports

Subscribe to alerts via email or sms that alert you to reports within the proximity of a specific location

The team are encouraging those that want to get involved to have a look a the wiki and get in touch.

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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 for approval. Here are some interesting statistics:

Facebook harnessed the power of a crowd (users) which in the end benefits both parties. Facebook gets a different version of their site at a low cost and the users get to view the site in their own language. Instead of hiring a team of translators Facebook decided to involve its users in the process.

What needs to be taken into account is that their are no direct benefits for participants and they participated out of their own free will.  Some might view this as an exploitation of labour but nobody is forcing anybody to do anything. What motivates these individuals who partake in these crowdsourcing tasks? Maybe just a personal need for something, a sense of fulfillment or joy at what they do?

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