Hooked on Social Networking: crowdsourcing

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Passion Intersection: Crowdsourcing and Humanitarianism

I'm absolutely fascinated by the concept of crowdsourcing. I love how it flows along the path of collaboration — input from multiple people used to create something new or better.

In my recent blog post on this topic, From Handbags to Traffic Navigation: Harnessing the Power of Crowdsourcing, I looked at some of the for-profit crowdsourcing sites that were changing our world by harnessing the expertise and experience of people both in our communities and around the world to creatively solve problems.

That post drove me to seek an intersection I was sure existed between two of my passions: crowdsourcing and making the world a better place, or in a word, humanitarianism. And I was not disappointed by what I found.

Five Pretty Amazing Nonprofit Crowdsourcing Sites

Here are five nonprofit sites who really are working to make the world a better place and who could use your expertise, time and experience.

Wikipedia immediately comes to mind as one of the most successful and well-known crowdsourcing sites. Created in 2001, it is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Written collaboratively by unpaid and largely anonymous Internet volunteers, Wikipedia, as of February 2012, attracted 470 million unique visitors a month. 77,000 active contributors from around the world have witten/edited/collaborated on over 22,000,000 articles in 285 languages, and hundreds of thousands of them make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles every day.

foldit engages online gamers (a competitive bunch) and uses their pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities to "see" protein folding patterns that computer programs miss. These solutions could someday help cure HIV/AIDs, cancer and Alzheimers.
World Community Grid is a worldwide humanitarian project that solves research problems by employing grid computing. By splitting work into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, this crowdsourcing effort pools and uses volunteers' excess computer processing power. Sponsored by IBM (disclaimer here — my employer), it brings people together from across the globe to create the largest non-profit computing grid benefiting humanity.
Help from Home is a UK-based association that has created a database to provide what they call "microvolunteering" — easy, quick, bite-sized and convenient crowdsourced volunteer-from-home opportunities. The tagline is "Changing the World in Just Your Pyjamas" and each opportunity has a "Pyjama Rating" attached to it, including my favorite "100% full-on pyjama zone".
Cell Slider is a collaboration between Cancer Research UK and Zooniverse which created an online interactive database of cancerous cell samples. The public is invited to help lab researchers investigate the two million images.

100% full-on pyjama zone

Bonus Crowdsourcing Site

duolingo

easy, quick, low commitment actions that benefit a worthy cause’ (as suggested by Help From Home)
2) ‘convenient, bite-sized, crowdsourced, and network-managed’ (as suggested by Sparked)
3) ‘the act of voluntary participating in small day-to-day situations that occupy a brief amount of time’
- See more at: http://helpfromhome.org/faqs#sthash.AR6Gjt5n.dpuf

(Phys.org) -- A new website wants people to translate the Web for free. The reward is that the website seeks to help the same people doing the translating to learn the language, for free. Duolingo launched today as a new startup, the brainchild of a Carnegie Mellon project. University computer scientists Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker thought up this venture in translating languages on the web by having language students themselves translate it while they simultaneously learn a new language, as a combination free language education website and crowdsourced online translation service.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-duolingo-crowdsourced.html#jCp

A new website wants people to translate the Web for free. The reward is that the website seeks to help the same people doing the translating to learn the language, for free. Duolingo launched today as a new startup, the brainchild of a Carnegie Mellon project. University computer scientists Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker thought up this venture in translating languages on the web by having language students themselves translate it while they simultaneously learn a new language, as a combination free language education website and crowdsourced online translation service.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-duolingo-crowdsourced.html#jCp

From Handbags to Traffic Navigation: Harnessing the Power of Crowdsourcing

The belief that two heads are better than one is an ancient one. As far back as the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament of the Bible, in fact. In 1546, a variation of this saying was found in English writer John Heywood's collection of proverbs: A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue. (phrases.org.uk)

Today, instead of a phrase, you're hearing the word "Crowdsourcing". A different word with a different definition, but ultimately driving toward the same goal as the ancient proverbs: Harnessing the power of multiple minds to creatively solve problems.

Note: I'm not including crowdfunding in this post, as I covered it in a three-part series I wrote last year. While it is arguably a type of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding harnesses the finances of the crowd to bring a new idea to life vs creating and expanding upon the ideas themselves.

A recent article in Smartplanet, How the crowd is making fashion design more efficient, got me thinking about just how widespread creative problem solving via crowdsourcing has become.

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The article takes a look at a New York company, Stitch Collective, launched in 2012 to produce crowdsourced handbags. To create a new handbag, Stitch Collective seeks submissions from fashion schools and design networks. New designers worldwide send in their ideas, then based on which designs are most feasible to produce, Stitch Collective chooses finalists, and its community of accessory enthusiasts vote on their favorite.

The advantages of crowdsourcing? Even in fashion, one of the more difficult industries for an emerging designer to break into, as the Smartplanet article states, "...a rising new class of fashion businesses that, instead of handing down mysteriously conceived designs from on high, is turning to the crowd to decide what to make, and how much of it."

There are a multitude of crowdsourcing sites creating business solutions, such as web design, graphics, microwork, and microtasks. A few notable crowdsourcing sites include:

gengo: An online translation service that uses a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide high-quality translations in 33 languages. (TechCrunch)
InnoCentive: Crowdsourced solutions to business, social, policy, scientific, and technical challenges from 300,000 diverse and creative thinkers and problem solvers from nearly 200 countries.
PatientsLikeMe: A data-sharing platform, where patients can share and learn from real-world, outcome-based health data.
waze: A community-based traffic and navigation app where 30 million drivers share real-time traffic and road info, either passively or actively. Gamification and social networking are included.
Update: Google is looking to buy waze. hmmm. (Mashable 0524/13)

I'll point out here that I'm not endorsing these crowdsourcing companies — they're all for-profit companies who demonstrate the variety of crowdsourcing solutions available.

After the flattening of the world and normalization of globalization, it's easy now (thank you, hindsight) to see just how inevitable and incredibly creative the concept of crowdsourcing really is. What better way to harness the expertise and experience of people both in our communities and around the world to creatively solve problems?

How Social Networking Won an Election and Paid for Cancer Treatment

I've always loved TIME magazine. It's well-designed — lots of action shots, catchy headlines, and insightful and informative articles. Now I follow TIME on Facebook and on Twitter, so I don't always read the hard copy that shows up at my house every week. I do try though. I've been taking it in the car — grabbing a few minutes while I'm waiting for my daughter at school or an appointment.

The December 3 issue — yes, the one with the colorful fruits and vegetables on the covers supporting an article on What to Eat Now by the well-known Dr. Oz — had two articles that grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, neither article is available online unless you're a subscriber, but they both very matter-of-factly focused on how fast and how much social networking is changing our world. I mean I know this — I'm passionate about it and do it every day — but to see it in black and white next to world news, the AIDs epidemic in South Africa, and an article about the fiscal cliff.... I was immediately pulled in.

The first article, Friend Request. How the Obama campaign connected with young voters appeared in the Nation section: fair enough. If you've read some of the campaign post-mortems that I've read, you've seen that it wasn't the much-publicized Latino vote or female vote that swung the election for President Obama, but the youth vote — voters under 29. And it turns out that over half of the voters in that age group targeted in swing states didn't have landline phones, making the traditional last minute phone calls impossible.

Image of smart phone with the word "Vote" displayed on it

Instead, the Obama campaign, a social-savvy team from day 1, built a Facebook application. (Are you thinking, "Of course they did!"? With the perfect vision hindsight gives us, I don't know why I was surprised.) It was rolled out to the more than one million Obama backers signed up. This app, like all Facebook apps, gave the campaign permission to look at the subscribers' Facebook friends. And communicating with this highly-valued, hard-to-reach target audience was made even easier because who do you trust more than your friends? Not some political campaign or advertiser. More than 5 million contacts were reached by the 600,000 Obama supporters who agreed to share messages. And so the campaign was won.

And the final word from TIME Magazine?
"In 2008, Twitter was a sideshow, and Facebook had about one-sixth its current reach in the U.S. By 2016, this sort of campaign-driven sharing over social networks is almost certain to be the norm. Tell your friends."

The second social-networking article that caught my eye was in the Health section, and titled, Crowdfunding a Cure. The sick are getting strangers to pay their medical bills. A quick glance at the sidebar shows you this headline: How This Cancer patient Raised $144,000.

I've been fascinated with the growth and potential of crowdfunding this year; writing a three-part series on the IBM Social Business Insights blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Instead of people raising money from their social circles for projects such as books, gadgets, CDs, or documentaries, crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe and GiveForward enable patients and their families to raise thousands of dollars for medical treatments such as surgeries and cancer treatments that would otherwise be out of their reach.

We're on the cusp of the most amazingly creative period in human history. Hyperbole? I don't think so. Worldwide collaboration, powered by social networking platforms, will give everyone a voice. Gender, age, ethnicity, language, location, education, ability — none of this will matter. Innovative companies like IBM will continue to pioneer enterprise-level collaboration platforms, enabling the worldwide, mobile, collaborative, inclusive workforce*. And consumer networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter and Kickstarter and GoFundMe and tumblr will continue to enable the collaboration and crowdsourcing that can help build a better world, for all of us.

Now truly, doesn't that just make your day? :-)

*Full disclosure — I am an IBM employee, and totally amazed by the forward-thinking creativity that goes on at my company every single day.
"Vote Button On Mobile Screen" image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Financial health" image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Social Network" image courtesy of cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Great Innovations — Crowdfunding with Innovocracy

I'm a huge fan of crowdfunding, and recently wrote a 3-part series on the IBM Social Business Insights blog that I'm in the process of reposting here on my blog (Part 1). But I'm so impressed with this crowdfunding site, innovacracy.org, and at least one of the projects on it, that I wanted to give it a special shout out.

According to the website, the idea behind Innovocracy is bridging the gap between ideas and reality in academic research:

"Both pure and applied research often reveal potential products and services that can have a positive impact on society. But taking that research and developing it into working prototypes or demonstrating a proof of concept can be challenging. In the academic environment finding the funds to build out and test ideas with commercial applications is often a challenge. Yet finding those funds can unlock the potential of the millions of dollars and thousands of hours spent on research programs. Innovocracy was created to bridge the gap between powerful ideas and beneficial applications of those ideas. We offer a funding source that connects people who want to support innovation in academic research and those innovators found on campuses around the world."

The innovation that really caught my attention is the Web-Based Volunteer Support Network for Blind and Low Vision People.

Screenshot of VizWiz in action.
The captioning reads: iPhone: Double tap the screen to take a photo.
Double tap again to post card and start asking question.

The basic concept is a wonderful example of crowdsourcing at its best. VizWiz is an iPhone application that blind people can use to answer visual questions in their everyday lives. Users simply take a picture and speak a question they’d like to know about it, and their questions are answered by people out on the web, usually in under a minute and all for free.

It was released to the Apple® App Store a little over a year ago, and has been a booming success with more than 5,000 users asking over 50,000 questions. So successful in fact with both users and potential volunteers that the current setup is unsustainable and the creator, Jeffrey Bigham, PhD, from the University of Rochester, is looking for $5,500 by September 14th to expand the service by creating a web site hub and answering center.

Crowdfunding sites are an amazing way of enabling via small amounts of one-on-one funding creativity and ingenuity that might otherwise not see the light of day. Check this one out and make a difference in someone's life.

Note: In researching this blog post, I found a few additional articles about VizWiz that might be of interest:

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Crowdfunding: Fundraising with a Social Twist

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 1 of 3) was originally published on June 12, 2012, and is owned by IBM.
I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content.

Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 1 of 3)

By Holly Nielsen, Social Media Manager and Webmaster, Human Ability and Accessibility

I’m fascinated with the power and reach of social networking. Every day I find something new – another clever idea of capitalizing on the power of all of these connected people who are online daily making new connections, sharing content, collaborating… It truly is a new world of interacting with others, and in many ways makes our huge world of seven billion residents feel a little smaller and much friendlier.

One of the social networking areas that’s captured my attention recently is crowdfunding, an offshoot of crowdsourcing. Oxford Dictionaries even has an official definition of crowdfunding:

The practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.

Crowdfunding is being used successfully by many types of people and groups for a broad range of projects and causes including creative projects, entrepreneurial products or technologies, artists, bands, or independent filmmakers seeking support, humanitarian aid, political campaigns, charities, and microlending.

Crowdfunding creative projects

I’m fascinated with three-year old Kickstarter – a platform that enables potential entrepreneurs with a creative idea to float the idea within the Kickstarter community to see if the people like the idea enough to fund it; lowering the barrier to entry dramatically. When you think about it, what an inexpensive (as in free) means to do market research and build your customer base, in one fell swoop.

The Kickstarter project funding categories are broad and range from art, to food, to publishing, technology, and theater. The average project is raising under $10,000, but take a look at the Most Funded page for a list of successfully funded projects and how much they received (one of them was 15,454% funded for a total of $77,271 pledged!)

Only 44% of the projects meet their financing goal, and a project that doesn’t meet its goal receives no money — that is, if the project doesn’t meet its funding goal, the supporters get their money back, so it’s a no-risk funding situation. But if you look at Kickstarter’s FAQs, it does talk about accountability, and do not take responsibility for the project creator completing the project after the money is handed over. It’s up to the donor to check out the project and creator thoroughly. The FAQ points out that “Because projects are usually funded by the friends, fans, and communities around its creator, there are powerful social forces that keep creators accountable.”

According to the website, more than $200 million for 20,000 projects has been raised. Kickstarter takes a cut, 5%, but only if the project is fully funded. In contrast to traditional venture capital funding, the project owners keep 100% ownership of their work.

Like all truly integrated social networking applications, Kickstarter is tied into all of the major social media channels, giving the project owners an easy way to promote their projects through their online and offline communities.

So what do investors get for their most popular pledge of $25 or average pledge of $70? There’s no tax write-off or ownership of the project, but the project creators offer rewards, related to the project itself. According to Kickstarter, here are the four most popular types of rewards with examples:

Copies of the item: The album, the DVD, a print from the show. These items should be priced what they would cost in a retail environment.
Creative collaborations: A backer appears as a hero in the comic, everyone gets painted into the mural, two backers do the handclaps for track 3.
Creative experiences: A visit to the set, a phone call from the author, dinner with the cast, a concert in your backyard.
Creative mementos: Polaroids sent from location, thanks in the credits, meaningful tokens that tell a story.

Projects with creative and tangible products are the most likely ones to get funded.

Stay tuned for part 2 to find out about how non-US residents can crowdfund their creative projects.