The Flickr Commons

Here's a good example of how crowdsourcing can enhance a commons:

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

It's an obvious approach to take, and one that could be widened to any public resource.

Vista's Problem: Microsoft Does Not Scale

It is deeply ironic that once upon a time Linux - and Linus - was taxed with an inability to scale. Today, though, when Linux is running everything from most of the world's supercomputers to the new class of sub-laptops like the Asus EEE PC and increasing numbers of mobile phones, it is Microsoft that finds itself unable to scale its development methodology to handle this range. Indeed, it can't even produce a decent desktop system, as the whole Vista fiasco demonstrates.

But the issue of scaling goes much deeper, as this short but insightful post indicates:

The world has been scaling radically since the Web first came on the scene. But the success of large, open-ended collaborations -- a robust operating system, a comprehensive encyclopedia, some "crowd-sourced" investigative journalism projects -- now is not only undeniable, but is beginning to shape expectations. This year, managers are going to have to pay attention.

Moreover, it points out exactly why scaling is important - and it turns out to be precisely the same reason that open source works so well (surprise, surprise):

The scaling is due to the basic elements in the Web equation: Lots of people, bazillions of pieces of information, and gigabazillions of links among them all. As more of the market, more of the supply chain, and more of the employees spend more of their time online, the scaled world of the Web begins to set the agenda for the little ol' real world.

Of the People, By the People, For the People

I'm rather slow in this one, but it's such a good example of how everyone gains from public collaboration - including Google, whose CTO of Google Earth, Michael Jones, is speaking here:

This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you'll see the roads, and if you expand a little bit, you'll see both roads and labelled places... there's graveyards, and some roads and so forth.

Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We've done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything - completely done by having locals use some software we haven't released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.

This is the future, people - your future (though I do wonder about the map data copyright in these situations).

Sharing the (Old) News About Crowdsharing

"Crowdsharing" has become rather a modish term for what is, after all, an old concept: broad-based collaborative working. It's true that the Internet has made such collaboration far easier and more global, but the idea is fundamentally the same as the one that Richard Stallman had twenty years ago.

Nonetheless, Assignment Zero, a collection of short interviews that dance around the crowdsourcing theme, is well worth wandering through. As well as the big names like Lessig, there's a host of less well-known players who deserve wider recognition for their attempts at applying open source principles in fields beyond software.

Crowdsourcing Sousveillance

I wrote recently about Microsoft's amazing Photosynth demo, which shows pictures of Notre-Dame taken from Flickr stitched together automatically to produce a three-dimensional model that you can zoom into in just about any way.

Then I read this:

Madeleine McCann's parents will appeal to Irish tourists to check holiday snaps for clues - while the flat their child was abducted from reportedly sold for half price.

Madeleine's parents Kate McCann, 38, and Gerry, 39, will appear on television to ask anyone who took a trip to Portugal in early May to send photos to British investigators.

It occurred to me that what we really need is a system that can take these holiday snaps and put them together in time to create a four-dimensional model that can be explored by the police - a new kind of crowdsourced sousveillance.

Given that Photosynth is still experimental, we're probably some way off this. I'd also have concerns about handing over all this information to the authorities without better controls on what would be done with it (look what's happening with the UK's DNA database.)

Wisdom of the Mindless Sports Fans

Although PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site, interests me not a jot, this is truly fascinating:

It’s all for fun, but the company started selling the top picks of its best users in October. For $10, you can get the collective picks of the top 30 users on five games. The idea was that people could use these for-fun picks to win bets in Vegas. The question was, would PicksPal be able to consistently beat Vegas odds, and the spread, with these picks.

So far, yes. By a lot. PicksPal’s overall record, against the spread, has been 562-338, or a 63% win rate. In college basketball, the win rate is 66%. In pro football, 62%. They are even getting a 52% win rate in pro hockey, their worst sport.

These look like incredibly strong results; it would be interesting to see how the results are in other areas where this idea is starting to be applied.

CrowdSpirit

Crowdsourcing in the French Alps:

Our business model is simply to design innovative electronic products by “you” for “you” and to reward the best “you” based on the products sales revenues& in practice “you” will be made by a community. CrowdSpirit will provide the means for this community to design, invest, produce, market, distribute and support the products that make business sense. To conclude, the community will assist and participate in every step of the product cycle and will earn money from these products based on each person’s contribution.

Dunno if it works, though.

The Real Crowdsourcing

Tuangou 团购 - not sourcing from crowds, but sourcing for crowds:

for tuangou, it's all about shopping, aggregating enough people to be able to get a discount or better terms on everything from cars to home remodelling materials to real estate.

This post also has a good picture of the physical reality of tuangou.

YRUHRN? - To Crowdsource a Book, Of Course

I've written about crowdsourcing before, and this is an interesting application: writing a book called "Why Are You Here - Right Now" (YRUHRN).

Project YRUHRN was started with one idea in September of 2006. It all started with a HIT posted on Amazon's mTurk offering a penny for your answer to 'Why are You Here - Right Now?'. From that HIT, over 500 answers were given in a weeks time.

We have taken those answers, and compiled them in a book that will speak to a part of everyone.

We will see if it is possible, through crowdsourcing and the power of work-at-home people, if a book can be written and published in just 30 days from idea to publishing.

Evidently it was, and the result can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com (for a while, at least).