El primer equipo de futbol con un “Entrenador Electrónico” — ALT1040. Los Murciélagos de Guamúchil son un equipo mexicano de futbol que participa en la Segunda División nacional; se podría decir que son uno más entre 37 de esta liga, pero en tienen algo que los hace un equipo diferente: es el primer club nacional que permite a sus aficionados decidir en tiempo real, a través del Internet o vía SMS, qué jugadores deben entrar de cambio; además sus fanáticos "ayudan" al entrenador a elegir sus tácticas y formaciones. Los directivos del equipo han llamado a este formato de cooperación "DT Electrónico" --una especie de crowdsourcing deportivo-- y es utilizado solamente en los partidos como local de los Murciélagos. El sistema del "DT Electrónico" es bastante curioso: cuando el director técnico del equipo desea hacer un movimiento elige dos jugadores probables, una vez que esto sucede los fanáticos en su votación deciden quién tiene que entrar al campo.
A partir de ahí una cosa llevó a la otra. For Bentham and Others, Scholars Enlist Public to Transcribe Papers. The painstaking job of transcribing often hard-to-decipher handwritten documents from history’s lead players — not to mention a lack of money — has meant that most originals are seen by a just a handful of scholars and kept out of the public’s reach altogether. After more than five decades, only slightly more than half of James Madison’s papers have been transcribed and published, while work on Thomas Jefferson’s papers, begun in 1943, probably won’t be finished until around 2025. Now the scholars behind the Bentham Project think they may have come up with a better way: crowd-sourcing. Starting this fall, the editors have leveraged, if not the wisdom of the crowd, then at least its fingers, inviting anyone — yes, that means you — to help transcribe some of the 40,000 unpublished manuscripts from University College’s collection that have been scanned and put online.
In the roughly four months since this Wikipedia-style experiment began, 350 registered users have produced 435 transcripts. Are two heads better than one? Sometimes... Generally, we assume that making decisions as a group is beneficial because groups can come together to make better choices than their members would alone. Is this true, or is group decision-making a case where a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? A new paper in Science this week has come to a conclusion: it depends. Each trial of the experiment paired up two of 72 male participants. Over two timed intervals, the researchers used computer screens to show each of the two partners a visual field with six small circles. During one of the two intervals, one of the six circles appeared to be slightly darker than the other five. In the first section of the experiment, the partners saw identical images on their computers, made their choice, and then were given the chance to communicate before coming to a final, joint decision.
The take-home lesson? The Extraordinaries: Minds for Sale: A review and critique of crowdsourced labor markets. Against Crowdsourced Politics | DigiActive.org. The Campaign for .nyc. All Our Ideas - A Suggestion Box for the Digital Age. Crowd-Sourced Initiatives to Create a More Livable New York City. City governance and open-source programming never seemed like a likely marriage. However, emerging initiatives have been working towards it, and have received a boost of popular support through Obama’s call for open government. When NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg launched the Big Apps competition this past June, he invited individuals and groups to program applications that make government data sets accessible to the public — solidifying that technology can contribute to improved quality of life. Applications created in response to Bloomberg’s decisions will join the crowd-sourced initiatives that already exist in New York City, and already explore methods that can offer residents not only information, but a place to gain a sense of community, to exchange ideas and to visualize space digitally.
COMMUNITY: dotNeighborhoods One of the great joys of New York City is the distinct character of each neighborhood. IDEA EXCHANGE: The Open Planning Project MAPPING: OasisNYC. The Backstory of Stuff: New Sites Enable More Transparency in the Supply Chain. By Kirstin Butler In simpler times, just checking the tag inside a t-shirt was enough to qualify you as a discerning consumer. Choosing goods “made in the USA” over countries with more lenient labor laws meant that you’d done your due diligence as a shopper. As geopolitics have become more complex, though, so too has the supply and demand of stuff; and now making even the most basic purchases can be fraught with considerably more anxiety. The good news is that while the times have gotten more complicated, technology has kept pace.
Until recently, visualizing global goods’ sourcing was the domain of contemporary artists and technoactivists. Enter Sourcemap, an open-source application for collective supply chain research and mapping. Introduction to Sourcemap from Matthew Hockenberry on Vimeo. An MIT-based team built Sourcemap’s applications around Google Earth, and its geotagged food, travel, and product maps will look familiar to anyone who has called up a set of road trip directions. IBM's Jim Spohrer on the Smarter Planet University Jam. IBM held their inaugural Smarter Planet University Jam earlier this year. The Jam was a crowdsourcing process held by IBM earlier this year where nearly 2,000 students from more than 200 universities from 40 countries around the world took part with the aim of building a Smarter Planet through technology.
Some of the findings from the Jam were: Eight of 10 students want universities to revamp traditional learning environmentOver 90% want to join or start a Green Advocacy group at their campus64% of students believe that the world has a chance to reverse carbon emissions by 2025 and60% believe that education and efficient transportation offer the best hope for sustainability of our cities I had the chance to talk to Jim Spohrer, the Director of IBM’s Global University Programs (GUP) recently about the Jam.
We discussed the thinking behind it, the outcomes what were its take-aways. Crowdsourced placemaking - charted. Crowdsourcing an urban creative center.