Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing definition, crowd wisdom, collective intelligence and how it works - Chaordix. Howe later refined his definition on his blog, while he was researching his seminal 2008 book, Crowdsourcing, with the following: The White Paper Version: “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” (Howe, 2008) The Sound bite Version: “The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.” (Howe, 2008) Jeff Howe’s Video Version: which also features Calgary’s iStockphoto, another local pioneering company in crowdsourcing. How Long Has Crowdsourcing Been Available?
The practice of tapping a crowd has long been used by business. Chaordix: A Pioneer in the Crowd The founding company of Chaordix opened its doors and began to innovate with crowdsourcing back in 2006 to identify highest-opportunity technology ventures for investment and development. La vedette du stock – Lise Gagné. Open Source software and crowdsourcing for energy analysis | Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Homepage | Idea Management Software | Business Innovation | SpigitIdea Management Software | Business Innovation | Spigit.
Crowdsourcing Software - Improve Innovations - Lithium Social Platform. Crowdsourcing: Pros, Cons, and More. Say you’re starting a new online shopping site, and you imported thousands of products. Now you need to tag and categorize them, a job which seems tedious and will take many hours of work. You could do it all by yourself, or you could outsource it to crowd, and the action of outsourcing a task to the undefined public is recognized as crowdsourcing.
In crowdsourcing, you can outsource the task to not only a small group of person, but also tens of thousands of people. That’s the genuine advantage of the crowdsourcing, bringing in mass intelligence to solve problems of all kinds with affordable price. The question is, is it really intelligent to use crowdsourcing? What are the tasks well suited for crowdsourcing? In this particular post, there’s gonna be an answer for all these questions. History of crowdsourcing The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Jeff Howe back in 2006, in a Wired article which described a new way of sourcing people who are willing to help or work on a project. Elance. 10 kickass crowdsourcing sites for your business. I’m not a believer in the so-called wisdom of the crowd, but I do think that crowdsourcing has cemented its place in modern business. Crowdsourcing, as you probably know, is a way of using ‘crowds’ to ‘source’ solutions to your problems.
What have you crowdsourced lately? Nothing? Well, if you run a website and have embraced user-centricity then think again... perhaps you have conducted user testing? Well, that’s crowdsourcing – asking the crowd for feedback - and it beats a top-down policy of allowing your board to design the website. Of course there’s more to life than usability testing. So what else can be crowdsourced? Check them out… Logo design = 99designs Need a logo? Brand names = namethis Not dissimilar to 99designs, this is a way of creating a 48-hour contest to find a brand name for your venture.
Business innovation = Chaordix “When you take direction from employees, customers, partners and other people passionate about your business, you will outperform the competition.” Hacker Visions - You Can’t Crowdsource Software. I gave a talk at Limewire last week, and my talk rambled around to crowdsourcing and Free Software. The point I made then, and the one I’m making now, is that when it comes to making software, crowdsourcing is a myth. There is no project built by a multitude of people each making a few small changes and additions to a codebase.
When I was a kid, I played Tetris until I saw falling tetraminos every time I closed my eyes. Likewise, almost every Free Software project has a few people that see code when they try to sleep. These folks make a series of big contributions, and they’re usually the source of the vast majority of productivity in the project. The crowd, those drive-by contributors who fix one shallow bug and then disappear, have relatively little impact, even cumulatively. Despite this, most projects recruit developers by dangling shallow bugs and todo lists of easy-to-implement features. This model is broken. Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time. Your Guide to the Crowdsourced Workforce. Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce.
The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We've written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we'll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.
The official definition of crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, is "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. " Others. The Next Evolution in Crowdsourcing. As we get closer to reaching the critical milestone of 40,000 testers in the uTest community (any day now!) , we knew we’d have to find ways to scale our community programs in order to manage, vet and engage our enormous pool of expert testers and QA professionals. Well, we didn’t have to look very far! The answers were right in front of us — where else but within the uTester community itself. As Matt said, “We found inspiration in seeing the enthusiasm and personal pride that resulted from members advising, supporting and training other members in our tester forums.”
From there, we launched three new initiatives – Sandbox, Crash Courses, and Test Team Lead – which catapulted uTest into the next phase of crowdsourcing, one that is self-sufficient, self-teaching, and self-policing. One that is “For uTesters, By uTesters.” For example, the Test Team Lead program gives uTest members the opportunity to earn paid leadership roles, mentoring and helping other testers succeed in their work. uTest Puts Managing a Crowdsourcing Community in the Hands of uTesters. Wired 14.06: El ascenso del Crowdsourcing. Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.
By Jeff HowePage 1 of 4 next » 1. The Professional Story Tools Story Images Click thumbnails for full-size image: Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. In October 2004, she ran across a stock photo collection by Mark Harmel, a freelance photographer living in Manhattan Beach, California. The National Health Museum has grand plans to occupy a spot on the National Mall in Washington by 2012, but for now it’s a fledgling institution with little money. After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent.
He can’t, of course. It took a while for Harmel to recognize what was happening. Cambrian House, Home of Crowdsourcing. TopCoder---Crowdsourcing Software Long Before Crowdsourcing Got Cool. Wade Roush4/23/09 Can competitions and prizes get you to the Moon? Google thinks so—it’s backing the $30 million Lunar X Prize, which will be awarded to the first privately funded team that sends a remote-controlled robot to the Moon, drives it 500 meters, and collects video of the trip. Back here on Earth, the $10 million Archon X Prize is being offered to the first team that can build a device that sequences 100 human genomes in 10 days or less, and the Wellpoint Foundation is proposing a $10 million Healthcare X Prize for the first organization that figures out how to deliver a 50 percent improvement in the cost-effectiveness of community healthcare over a three-year period.
Right here in the Boston area, Waltham, MA-based InnoCentive is using the prize model to attract solutions for dozens of problems, ranging from improving the fire resistance of polyurethane foam to accelerating the growth of soybean shoots. Crowdsourced Software. A new crowdsourcing company, called Cambrian House, launched this week. The idea is pretty straightforward – open source software development minus the free labor. It's a little hard to evaluate whether Cambrian House can develop competitive applications in an increasingly crowded market, but I'm impressed with the degree to which they've thought out the model.
I also like that they intend to put the crowd to work at three separate tasks: 1) originating the ideas; 2) evaluating the ideas; and 3) developing the code itself. Postscript: I hope my regular readers will forgive the lapse between posts. My goal is to never let more than a week elapse and, if significant or interesting developments occur, post in as reactive a manner possible. Crowdsourced Software Development? This afternoon, the MatrixMaxx team at Matrix Group held a Town Hall meeting with clients to get feedback on about a half dozen features slated to go into the 10.1 version (scheduled for release in early February). We could have surveyed clients via e-mail or a Web survey; we could have conducted a focus group; we could have called a select group of clients and consultants; or we could have gone with our gut and made decisions about credit card processing, meeting wait lists, individual relationships, etc.
Instead, we decided to crowdsource the specifications. Crowdsource? What does this mean? Wikipedia defines “crowdsourcing” as the “act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) and asking for contributions.” The Mechanics of the Town Hall Meeting Immediate Benefits of our Crowdsourcing Experiment The biggest benefit to the software team?
Crowdsourced software could stop SMS spam - tech - 26 February 2011. Is your cellphone buzzing with unwanted text messages? A system that filters out SMS spam by enlisting the help of your friends could calm things down. In the western world, receiving an illicit text is a minor annoyance, but it's a major problem in developing countries like India.
In that country, it is estimated that 100 million spam messages are sent every day, according to a report issued last year by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. "That was one of the big motivations for us to start looking at this problem," explains Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, who developed the software package, SMSAssassin, with colleagues at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in New Delhi, India. SMS filtering is not a new idea, and existing methods work much like email spam detectors. They all learn to identify spam messages by examining known spam, but this is less effective for SMS messages because their brevity makes it hard to identify features unique to spam. More From New Scientist. Pentagon Pushes Crowdsourced Manufacturing.
Designing and building things for the United States military is a notoriously slow-moving and costly endeavor. The time from idea to manufacturing for a new armored personnel carrier or a tank is typically 10 to 20 years. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to change that, and drastically so. It seeks to cut the design-to-production cycle to two to four years. So how are they going to do it? Crowdsourcing and prize contests are crucial ingredients in the speed-up recipe. The crowdsourcing effort will rely on a software initiative, called Vehicleforge.mil, which will be a Web portal for gathering, sharing and testing ideas. G.E. Darpa, a government-sponsored research program, has enlisted scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Vanderbilt University, University of Pennsylvania, and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric.
G.E.’s research arm announced its collaboration with M.I.T. on Thursday. The Vehicleforge.mil program, Dr. European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing: software and methodologies for harnessing geographic information from the crowd (ENERGIC) GPS software built on crowdsourcing. 5 Tips for Crowdsourcing Your Next Marketing Campaign. Those who came of age during the social media revolution may take it for granted that you, the consumer, are often called upon to be an active participant in your favorite brand’s marketing. But it wasn’t always this way. Until very recently, marketing was a one-way conversation. That’s how advertising always worked. Can you picture Don Draper saying, “Let’s just have consumers come up with the next campaign”?
Of course, a lot has changed since 1965. Technology now lets you do your job from home or wherever you happen to be. Victors & Spoils employs 17 people full time, but has relationships with 6,500 people who are on call for advertising work of one kind or another. Those who carry out crowdsourcing campaigns, though, don’t draw a great distinction. 1. Whether you’re doing behind-the-scenes crowdsourcing or asking consumers to pick the next flavor of your soft drink, you need to be very specific about what you’re asking them to do. 2. The other thing to consider are second prizes. 3. Popular Investigación Crowdsourcing ahora disponible para todo el mundo - Diario crowdsourcing.
Crowd testing: el poder de las masas utilizado para mejorar apps. Por todos es conocido el modelo clásico de testing: una organización empleando emuladores y unos pocos dispositivos o equipos de prueba que no representan ni de lejos toda la variedad (inmensa como nunca tras la aparición de smartphones y tablets) ni los usos habituales de un usuario no experto en la materia. ¿Qué es lo mejor que puede suceder al optar por esta aproximación? Pues algo tan obvio como que la muestra, tanto de personas como de sistemas, no represente la complejidad existente en las empresas de este nuevo milenio. Ante este negro panorama sólo caben dos opciones. La primera es tratar de abarcar la máxima cantidad de sujetos experimentales, lo más representativos del que será consumidor final de la app, con la mayor cantidad de equipos y sistemas abarcable por unos presupuestos sin duda ingentes e inasumibles en muchas ocasiones.
La segunda, optar por llevar a cabo el testing de una manera distinta e innovadora. Y esa fórmula mágica ha venido de las propias masas.