Crowd-Funding For Everything Else: Pets, Health Care, College, You Name It. Brad Damphousse describes GoFundMe as a "human interest goldmine," and it’s true. The "crowd-funding site for the rest of us" is, frankly, inspiring. From the 7-foot-8-inch man who raises money for more appropriate shoes, to the kid who sings his way to college, to Lucky, the tortured dog, who finds cash for vet bills, to the young woman who follows her dream of becoming a professional bobsledder: GoFundMe has it all. Kickstarter looks frivolous by comparison. "It’s people experiencing the long-tail of everyday life," says CEO Damphousse, "everything from weddings to funerals, education, youth sports, animals and pets. It’s a place where family, friends, and communities, come together to support one another. " In the old days, people used to put hard-luck ads on magazine back-pages: requests that nobody would ever read, or respond to. GoFundMe is also a decent business.
What’s the future for such sites? Cool Crowdsourcing Projects. The Rise of Collaboration | Video channel on TED.com. Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation. Does crowd-sourcing Innovation and ideas encourage real Innovation or a culture of collective mediocriity, focus groups and slick presenters | A conversation on TED.com.
Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole: Science is for everyone, kids included. John Wilbanks: Let’s pool our medical data. Home - Daily Crowdsource. First directory of community crowdsourcing projects launches today. Cooking Up a Crowdsourced Digitization Project that Scales. If the NYPL Labs’ crowdsourced menu transcription project only whetted your appetite, now the University of Iowa Libraries is taking it to the next level with a similar project for transcribing, among other things, recipes.
The libraries are launching DIY History, a new initiative that crowdsources the transcription and tagging of primary sources. The project follows on from the libraries’ first crowdsourcing experiment, the Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project, which debuted in spring 2011 and transcribed over 15,000 pages of diaries and letters. DIY History offers a broader scope of materials than just the Civil War documents, including the Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks digital collection, the Iowa Byington Reed Diaries from the Iowa Women’s Archives, and the Nile Kinnick Collection (correspondence and diaries belonging to the Iowan football star).
6 Unusual Crowdsourcing Projects | DesignCrowd United States Blog. Here are 6 unusual projects that were crowdsourced successfully through DesignCrowd: 1. Your Very Own Beverage Label. Do you make the best brew out of anyone you know? Have you ever considered labelling it and selling it to your mates? If you want to get serious (or just give a great gift) consider labelling your very own beverage creations like this company did. The results were creative and appealing and you can see for yourself what designers can do with a creative brief!
View the results of the contest here! 2. Recently, on DesignCrowd, a company crowdsourced their logo for a surfboard company and got some amazing submissions. Check out the other amazing designs here! 3. Got your perfect idea but don't have the design capabilities to carry it out? See the many variations of Milhouse here! 4. Have you ever watched an old movie and wondered if you should have your own seal to put on letters? The rest of the designs can be viewed here. 5. Are you a budding actor or actress? 6. The Key Questions of Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing Projects. To sum up my series of posts on different considerations for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage projects I thought it would be helpful to lay out a set of questions to ask when developing or evaluating projects. I think if a project has good answers to each of these four genres of questions it is well on its way toward success.
Four Areas of Questioning Human Computation Key Questions: How could we use human judgment to augment computer processable information? What parts of a given task can be handled through computational processing and which cant and of those parts that can’t can we create structured tasks that allow people to do this work? It would be a waste of the public’s time to invite them in to complete a task that a computer could already complete.
The value human computation offers is the question of how the unique capabilities of people can be integrated into systems for the creation of public goods. Wisdom of Crowds Key Questions: Scaffolding Users Key Questions: Brumfield, B. Life in a Day (2011. Crowdsourcing a Better World. Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work. A friend who is a reader of Fixes recently told me she was often frustrated by the column. She doesn’t run a nongovernmental organization or design products to help bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers get drinkable water. She isn’t going to take six months to volunteer in Nepal. She’s a New Yorker with a job — what can she do, she asked, to contribute to changing the world?
There’s always writing a check, of course. Money is what every project needs most. Beyond that, however, there is a relatively new way for individuals to participate in social change through crowdsourcing, which is a fix in itself. The crowdsourcing concept — collecting contributions from many individuals to achieve a goal — was being used long before Wikipedia. But online crowdsourcing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the efficiencies it brings to communicating within a large group make it useful in many new ways. 7 Crowdsourced Projects That You Can Take Part In Right Now. Without even realizing it, you may have been part of a crowdsourced project. Any beta invite to a new web startup is like a crowdsourced effort. Remember, Google Image Labeler, a game that improved Google Image Search? Well, that too was a crowdsourced effort and you probably never realized it. Well, that in a nutshell captures the spirit of crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing has grown into a movement and its improving our lives in ways we do not realize. Check out our infographic on crowdsourcing for a visual explanation. Dickens Journal Online The idea behind the project is to make the journals of Charles Dickens accessible to the blind and visually impaired by using text-to-speech technologies we have today. EteRNA The premise behind this crowdsourced science project could be that sometimes non-biologists and even the unscientific mind can see patterns that can escape the boffin. OpenStreetMap Think Google Maps, and then think about it being editable. ReCAPTCHA Social Attire 7 Billion Ideas.
List of crowdsourcing projects. A Crowdsourced Hyperlocal City Guide, Coming To You Soon. DavisWiki is a hard thing to describe. It’s a blog as a blog would be written by an entire community. It’s a virtual bulletin board that’s more comprehensive than Craigslist and Patch and Yelp combined. It’s simultaneously a history repository and a live ticker of today’s news (Community alert!
The U.C. Davis Police Department is searching for a man suspected of trying to kidnap a young girl on campus.) DavisWiki is, in short, a mind-boggingly well-populated web portal where the people of this California college town have dumped seemingly everything they know about the place. UC Davis students launched the site eight years ago, before most people knew what a wiki was, when Wikipedia itself was still considered dodgy. “It’s the most comprehensive, hyperlocal thing ever,” says Philip Neustrom, who helped launch the site as a student and now works as the executive director of its universal version 2.0, LocalWiki. DavisWiki was an attempt to trap it somewhere in cyberspace. Student Design Competition | CHI 2013. Student Design Competition Quick Facts Submission: 9 January 2013 (5:00pm PDT) PCS Submission SystemNotification: 10 February 2013Camera Ready: 17 February 2013Submission Format: Camera-ready unanonymized six-page document in Extended Abstract Format and proof of all team members’ student status.Selection process: JuriedAt the Conference: Up to 12 accepted design competition submissions will present posters at the conference; 4 of these teams will be chosen to give a presentation.
Please see the Information for Poster Presenters.Archives: Extended abstracts; DVD and ACM Digital Library Message from the Student Design Competition Chairs This is the 11th year of the CHI Student Design Competition. We are excited to be chairing the Student Design Competition and the maturing role of student design within CHI. Thecla Schiphorst, School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University, Canada Carola Zwick, Weissensee School of Art, Germany sdc@chi2013.acm.org The Design Problem.