The Crowdsourcing Blog

Over time, we’re seeing the figures around crowdsourcing getting higher and higher, and with further importance.

Proof of this is another great example, GE has a competition for students, businesses or pretty much anyone with an idea for Renewable Energy, Grid Efficiency, or EcoHomes/EcoBuildings, to submit them and the best ones will get funding from a $200 million total. For this, they’re teaming up with a few VC companies.

It’s called the Ecoimagination Challenge.

Here are some stats:

- 1.309 ideas logged already

- 33.210 votes

- 16.309  comments

- 16.291 users

Impressive! And what I find most importat, besides obviously the submission of ideas, is the comment part: this is fueling a great discussion about energy and its alternatives, which can boast not only better knowledge but also a greater awareness of the public for this cause.

And everybody wins! The public with new technology developed and GE and its VC partners, for business growth.

The competition will end at 30th September, and we’ll follow up on this as soon as there is an announcement on the funded ideas.

We’ve had a few posts about crowdsourcing initiatives in the movie business. Interestingly enough, yesterday Techcrunch TV posted a very interesting video on this subject, with Gene Massey from Cinema Shares.

Also if you get a chance after the video, check out the interesting discussion going on in the comment section on Techcrunch.

But first, here’s the video:

Dan Brown is a vlogger who started his career showing how to solve a Rubik’s Cube (a video now with close to 16 million views).

That was in 2007 and since then he’s built a fan-base, which he is using now to do a new show: ”Dan 3.0″ where he’ll ask them to make a decision for him on what to do for a whole year.

Sure this is a publicity stunt and just another reason to do a show (remember the dot com guy? Slight different but awfully similar, and that was back in 2010 when Dan Brown was just an infant!), but the core of the project is really about crowdsourcing decision making.

For that, rhere are plenty of this types of services out there (even Q&A ones can do the trick) for those with some trouble making decisions. Even Twitter can be used to help you make decisions, using your social graph.

But what about this project, what you make of it? Will it be just for fun or show another light on the power of the crowd?

The Guardian was reporting yesterday that one of the UK’s Government attempt at crowdsourcing has failed.

In an effort to crowdource the coallition’s programme, 9.500 entries were received but not one department took those into consideration for a change.

According to the newspaper, “its formal responses, published on each website, shows Whitehall regarded the process largely as an endorsement of what it was already doing.”

Sure, the use of crowdsourcing is not always meant to get the best of the crowd but more like to get their engagement, be it a brand or government in this case, but not acknowledging the crowd’s effort is a big no.

There are still other crowdsourcing initiatives from the UK government (one dealing with the treasury, other with laws), but this latest example doesn’t bode well for them.

Let’s see if they can turn it around and actually use the power of the crowd in an effective way.

This is a topic I’ve wanted to talk about a few weeks ago when the news came out, but we’ve had the server down last week and it kind of fell through.

So in May, the INTERPOL launched a program – Operation Infra-Red – to help out find 450 wanted criminals across the globe.

The thing is, with the deadline approaching (16th July) they released a call for for everyone out there to help out, and meant to leverage the power of the social networks ubiquitous in our everyday life.

Here’s what assistant director of Interpol’s Fugitive Investigative Support unit says about it:

“It is more likely that someone will recognize one these fugitives from a social networking site or a chat room than spotting them walking down the street, but no matter how a member of the public has the information, we would ask that they pass it on.”

As a side note, interesting use of video to pass the message along about the operation.

The results of the operation, released at the end of last week, were that they received information about 357 of the 450 fugitives, having arrested 131 (although no details about which numbers were before and after the social networks initiative).

This sure feels a natural step to the subject, as long steps are taken not to make people paranoid or invade innocent bystanders privacy.

In essence, it is the what the FBI’s Most Wanted List has been doing for years (and with the same goals), but taken to another level.

On this subject, the US government launched a few weeks ago their own app store (which can be found here), and amongst them you’ll find an FBI Most Wanted List app!

So what do you think, might this be one aspect of future criminal investigation / law enforcement / criminal catching?

The trend for crowdsourcing in filmmaking continues, this time in an even bigger effort and larger audience made possible by Youtube (and sponsored by LG).

Youtube partnered with Ridley Scott (director of Blade Runner, Gladiator, amongst many others) and Kevin MacDonald (director of Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland) to have everyone film their day on Saturday and then submit it to the site.

Youtube is visited by millions of people every single day, and on Saturday, the top page of every video seen had link to the project, so you can see how this crowdsourced documentary effort reached more people than ever for entries.

They’re calling it a “unique experiment in social filmmaking” meant for future generations to watch, and the director will go over all the submitted entries to make the final film.

Interestingly, they also had some guidelines for participants, like film something banal” like going to work or breakfast time, the sunrise, your baby doing something interesting, going to the hospital to visit a friend, your birthday, going for a walk in the countryside, or something “much more meaningful and emotional,” such as the demolition of your favorite building or the death of a friend your wedding.

Plus, the director also wants people to answer some questions, like what do you fear the most, what do you love, what makes you laugh, and oddly, what’s in your pocket?

We’ll follow up on this as there is more news about it, or hopefully the full movie.

For more, check out the official Youtube channel of the project.

You guessed it, it was crowdsourced!

Until recently, India’s currency was represented with “Rs” (also used by Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka). But facing rival economies and symbols like €, $ or £, India decided it was time to get their own symbol.

So they launched a competition open to everyone, with a prize of Rs250,000 ($5,352), and the following conditions:

- it should be applicable to the standard keyboard

- be in the national language script or a visual representation

- and should represent the historical and cultural ethos of the country.

Yesterday, a jury from the Indian government selected the winning entry, from Udaya Kumar, a post-graduate student at Mumbai’s Industrial Design Centre.

This is an event of huge proportions. From now on and for many years to come, this will be the official rupee symbol, in a country with a population of +1 billion. A symbol that will be present everyday of their life.

Back to the symbol, acordding to Kumar, cited by the Indian Express, the concept is “based on the Tricolour and arithmetic equivalence. While the white space between the two horizontal lines gives the impression of the national flag with the Ashok Chakra, the two bold parallel lines stand for ‘equals to’, representing balance in the economy, both within and with other economies of the world.”

Contests of this kind have been happening for other events for years now (like the olympics, etc), so it’s not exactly new. But if we call it crowdsourcing it suddently seems new!

While it isn’t new, we have to see the importance and the impact this particular competition will have on an entire country and economy, and maybe influence the way other competitions will take shape in the future.

The news broke today in multiple sites that David Lynch is looking to fund his next movie – a documentary about his life and work – by his fans.

Here’s the deal: fans donate $50 and get a limited edition print, t-shirt or tote bag with an abstract self-portrait the director made himself,  in return.

Plus, the producers say this fans will also get to give out some input for the film, although they don’t specify the scope this input and how it could impact the project.

This is very interesting news and another example of more and more creative artists and filmmakers using fans to finance their endeavours. Of course, in the process, they will get a more engaged fan base that will ultimately benefit them even more than the financing itself.

Is this the future of filmmaking? Well, maybe not, perhaps it will always be just a niche among projects, but one that is growing and growing everyday, particularly amongst independent artists.

If you want to know more this project and get involved, head over to the Lynch Three site.

We plan to do a follow-up on some projects we talk about here to see how things are moving along, and the first one in this kinds of posts is the crowdsourced SyFy movie.

The site went live a few days after we posted it, and from the looks of it, at this point at least it seems to follow a safer model where experts have provided 3 different plots, and then the crowd gets to choose from them.

And the plots are:

Bermuda Triangle: When the President’s plane goes down in the Bermuda Triangle, a rescue force discovers that the cause of unexplained disappearances is not an electromagnetic force or weather anomalies – it’s a monstrous alien creature.

Roswell: In 1947, something crash-landed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. Pieces of the strange craft were found, photographed and quickly confiscated by the U.S. government – but no one ever talks about the living creature that was recovered from the site.

2012: On December 21st in the last year of the Mayan calendar, something thought long dead rises to live again – and that means trouble for civilization.

Sure the readers get to choose but it’s very limited to the choices they already made – in this case, 3 different stories (our proposed fifth model of competitive crowdsourcing).

And due to that, it’s also a safer choice. But also it weakens the engagement of the community when compared to a full-blown idea suggestion by the crowd.

The following “decisions” (wardrobe, etc) will probably follow a similar path, but we’ll be back with further follow-ups and discussion of it.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about game mechanics, and once post about how games are helping search engines get better through crowdsourcing.

In this last example, two benefitial actions are ocurring at the same time: 1) people are having fun 2) people are helping make something better (a search engine).

But in spite of all the attention game mechanics are getting nowadays, there are other types of mechanics that are being used very effectively in crowdsourcing, particularly the case we want to mention in this post: reCAPTCHA.

The concept is deceptively simple: in order to controll Spam on a site and for a user to prove it is indeed human and not a script, he or she has to write the correct word on an image. But it’s not any word: it’s portions of old books, newspapers, etc, in an effort to digitize them in a way automatic computer programs (optical character recognition or OCR software) can’t.

So going back to the games and search engine example that had two benefits, this mechanics also has (at least) two benefits: people can safely register without being considered a bot (and website owners can control if there are real people on the site or not), and old content is digitized by real humans, in an accurate way.

This technology was acquired by Google in 2009, and it turns out, it was created by Luis von Ahn, the same computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who founded Gwap and the software that was licenced to become the Google Image Labeler sort of game.

We found a video of his presentation on Human Computation at Google Tech Talks (the same talks as the one in our last post), so here you have it, another hour of great insights to watch:

Brilliant work really, and we’re looking forward to see what other businesses will do to creatively give out benefits to their users while at the same time distributing tasks to the crowd in a way that everyone wins.