The Key To Crowdsourcing? Smarter Crowds. For nearly a decade, we’ve been hearing about the power of the crowd and the ability of social networks to unleash their power in everything from building an encyclopedia to helping people predict the ebbs and flows of equities markets.
Crowds are a great resource and a trove of valuable information - when they work. When they don’t, it doesn’t take much to question the wisdom of the crowd. In Sunday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt gave a primer on crowdsourcing, complete with the failure of crowds to predict the Supreme Court’s recent health care decision. That decision gave critics of crowdsourcing fodder for attacking the model, but Leonhardt was quick to point out that the so-called experts and insiders are often just as flawed in their own predictions.
“The answer, I think, is to take the best of what both experts and markets have to offer, realizing that the combination of the two offers a better window onto the future than either alone,” he wrote. Not All Crowds Are Created Equal. How to Build a Superteam of Ordinary (But Motivated) Volunteers. How the Peace Corps is Building a Community of Volunteers Online. When volunteers return home from service with The Peace Corps, they often want to stay in touch with fellow Corps members.
Can social media help them do that? Yes, says Erica Burman, director of communications at The National Peace Corps Association (NPCA). The Peace Corps, a U.S. service program, sends Americans across the world to volunteer and develop cross-cultural understanding. Peace Corps members, who serve for 27 months, share a bond with one another. "Once a volunteer, always a volunteer," goes their informal motto.
Erica Burman's organization is an "alumni association" for Peace Corps volunteers who have returned home. "Social media is really important to us," says Burman. Before the days of social media, trying to maintain a community of returned volunteers was a tedious challenge. But social media has changed that. The NPCA makes it a point to celebrate these user-created groups while simultaneously tying them to the larger Peace Corps online community. Four Steps to Building Community the Right Way. Games That Solve Real Problems: Crowdsourcing Biochemistry.
Crowdsourcing Science Promises Hope For Curing Deadly Disease. Sarah Fortune, a tuberculosis (TB) researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, had thousands of images of multiplying TB cells piling up in her lab.
Her team of graduate students were inundated: all the pictures had to be labeled; some probably held the key to combating a deadly bacteria that infects one-third of the global population, mostly in poor parts of Asia, Africa and South America. But that information was locked away in images that could take years to decipher: a single day of research could take weeks to interpret.
Fortune's solution might prove to be a watershed moment in biology. After consulting researchers at MIT, she was faced with two options: spend years applying for grants building a image identification algorithm, or crowdsource the job. Fortune, like many of her colleagues, had never heard of crowdsourcing but made a connection through the organizers of PopTech, leading to a collaboration with Crowdflower. CrowdFlower says it may now enter the science space. The 9 Skills Needed to Be a Super-Connector. Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur.
He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book he’s giving away free. He built and sold Reset, Inc in 1998 and Stockpickr.com in 2007, among others. You can follow him @jaltucher. I know why I’m not a billionaire. I’m horrible at following up. But that said, I love meeting new people and I’ve always done a good job with the initial skills involved with meeting new people. But here are the 9 Skills You Need to Become a Super-Connector.