Alpheus Bingham, co-founder and a member of the board of directors at InnoCentive, in Wired: “But over the course of a decade, what we now call cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications has taken the world by storm and become mainstream. Today, cloud computing is an umbrella term that applies to a wide variety of successful technologies (and business models), from business apps like Salesforce.com, to infrastructure like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), to consumer apps like Netflix. It took years for all these things to become mainstream, and if the last decade saw the emergence (and eventual dominance) of the cloud over previous technologies and models, this decade will see the same thing with crowdsourcing.
Both an art and a science, crowdsourcing taps into the global experience and wisdom of individuals, teams, communities, and networks to accomplish tasks and work. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live, or what you do or believe — in fact, the more diversity of thought and perspective, the better. Diversity is king and it’s common for people on the periphery of — or even completely outside of — a discipline or science to end up solving important problems.
The specific nature of the work offers few constraints – from a small business needing a new logo, to the large consumer goods company looking to ideate marketing programs, or to the nonprofit research organization looking to find a biomarker for ALS, the value is clear as well.
To get to the heart of the matter on why crowdsourcing is this decade’s cloud computing, several immediate reasons come to mind:
Crowdsourcing Is Disruptive
Much as cloud computing has created a new guard that in many ways threatens the old guard, so too has crowdsourcing. …
Crowdsourcing Provides On-Demand Talent Capacity
Labor is expensive and good talent is scarce. Think about the cost of adding ten additional researchers to a 100-person R&D team. You’ve increased your research capacity by 10% (more or less), but at a significant cost – and, a significant FIXED cost at that. …
Crowdsourcing Enables Pay-for-Performance.
You pay as you go with cloud computing — gone are the days of massive upfront capital expenditures followed by years of ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs. Crowdsourcing does even better: you pay for solutions, not effort, which predictably sometimes results in failure. In fact, with crowdsourcing, the marketplace bears the cost of failure, not you….
Crowdsourcing “Consumerizes” Innovation
Crowdsourcing can provide a platform for bi-directional communication and collaboration with diverse individuals and groups, whether internal or external to your organization — employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Much as cloud computing has consumerized technology, crowdsourcing has the same potential to consumerize innovation, and more broadly, how we collaborate to bring new ideas, products and services to market.
Crowdsourcing Provides Expert Services and Skills That You Don’t Possess.
One of the early value propositions of cloud-based business apps was that you didn’t need to engage IT to deploy them or Finance to help procure them, thereby allowing general managers and line-of-business heads to do their jobs more fluently and more profitably…”
Facilitating scientific discovery through crowdsourcing and distributed participation
Antony Williams in EMBnet. journal:” Science has evolved from the isolated individual tinkering in the lab, through the era of the “gentleman scientist” with his or her assistant(s), to group-based then expansive collaboration and now to an opportunity to collaborate with the world. With the advent of the internet the opportunity for crowd-sourced contribution and large-scale collaboration has exploded and, as a result, scientific discovery has been further enabled. The contributions of enormous open data sets, liberal licensing policies and innovative technologies for mining and linking these data has given rise to platforms that are beginning to deliver on the promise of semantic technologies and nanopublications, facilitated by the unprecedented computational resources available today, especially the increasing capabilities of handheld devices. The speaker will provide an overview of his experiences in developing a crowdsourced platform for chemists allowing for data deposition, annotation and validation. The challenges of mapping chemical and pharmacological data, especially in regards to data quality, will be discussed. The promise of distributed participation in data analysis is already in place.”
Building a Smarter City
PSFK: “As cities around the world grow in size, one of the major challenges will be how to make city services and infrastructure more adaptive and responsive in order to keep existing systems running efficiently, while expanding to accommodate greater need. In our Future Of Cities report, PSFK Labs investigated the key trends and pressing issues that will play a role in shaping the evolution of urban environments over the next decade.
A major theme identified in the report is Sensible Cities, which is bringing intelligence to the city and its citizens through the free flow of information and data, helping improve both immediate and long term decision making. This theme consists of six key trends: Citizen Sensor Networks, Hyperlocal Reporting, Just-In-Time Alerts, Proximity Services, Data Transparency, and Intelligent Transport.
The Citizen Sensor Networks trend described in the Future Of Cities report highlights how sensor-laden personal electronics are enabling everyday people to passive collect environmental data and other information about their communities. When fed back into centralized, public databases for analysis, this accessible pool of knowledge enables any interested party to make more informed choices about their surroundings. These feedback systems require little infrastructure, and transform people into sensor nodes with little effort on their part. An example of this type of network in action is Street Bump, which is a crowdsourcing project that helps residents improve their neighborhood streets by collecting data around real-time road conditions while they drive. Using the mobile application’s motion- detecting accelerometer, Street Bump is able to sense when a bump is hit, while the phone’s GPS records and transmits the location.
The next trend of Hyperlocal Reporting describes how crowdsourced information platforms are changing the top-down nature of how news is gathered and disseminated by placing reporting tools in the hands of citizens, allowing any individual to instantly broadcast about what is important to them. Often using mobile phone technology, these information monitoring systems not only provide real-time, location specific data, but also boost civic engagement by establishing direct channels of communication between an individual and their community. A good example of this is Retio, which is a mobile application that allows Mexican citizens to report on organized crime and corruption using social media. Each issue is plotted on a map, allowing users and authorities to get an overall idea of what has been reported or narrow results down to specific incidents.
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Data Transparency is a trend that examines how city administrators, institutions, and companies are publicly sharing data generated within their systems to add new levels of openness and accountability. Availability of this information not only strengthens civic engagement, but also establishes a collaborative agenda at all levels of government that empowers citizens through greater access and agency. For example, OpenSpending is a mobile and web-based application that allows citizens in participating cities to examine where their taxes are being spent through interactive visualizations. Citizens can review their personal share of public works, examine local impacts of public spending, rate and vote on proposed plans for spending and monitor the progress of projects that are or are not underway…”
Crowdsourcing Mobile App Takes the Globe’s Economic Pulse
Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review: “In early September, news outlets reported that the price of onions in India had suddenly spiked nearly 300 percent over prices a year before. Analysts warned that the jump in price for this food staple could signal an impending economic crisis, and the Research Bank of India quickly raised interest rates.
A startup company called Premise might’ve helped make the response to India’s onion crisis timelier. As part of a novel approach to tracking the global economy from the bottom up, the company has a daily feed of onion prices from stores around India. More than 700 people in cities around the globe use a mobile app to log the prices of key products in local stores each day.
Premise’s cofounder David Soloff says it’s a valuable way to take the pulse of economies around the world, especially since stores frequently update their prices in response to economic pressures such as wholesale costs and consumer confidence. “All this information is hiding in plain sight on store shelves,” he says, “but there’s no way of capturing and aggregating it in any meaningful way.”
That information could provide a quick way to track and even predict inflation measures such as the U.S. Consumer Price Index. Inflation figures influence the financial industry and are used to set governments’ monetary and fiscal policy, but they are typically updated only once a month. Soloff says Premise’s analyses have shown that for some economies, the data the company collects can reliably predict monthly inflation figures four to six weeks in advance. “You don’t look at the weather forecast once a month,” he says….
Premise’s data may have other uses outside the financial industry. As part of a United Nations program called Global Pulse, Cavallo and PriceStats, which was founded after financial professionals began relying on data from an ongoing academic price-indexing effort called the Billion Prices Project, devised bread price indexes for several Latin American countries. Such indexes typically predict street prices and help governments and NGOs spot emerging food crises. Premise’s data could be used in the same way. The information could also be used to monitor areas of the world, such as Africa, where tracking online prices is unreliable, he says.”
Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together
Rachel Metz in MIT Technology Review: “OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities.
If you buy several Internet-connected home gadgets—say, a “smart” thermostat, “smart” door lock, and “smart” window blinds—you’ll likely have to control each one with a separate app, meaning it exists in its own little silo.
That’s not how Elier Ramirez does it. In his home, an iPad app controls his lights, ceiling fans, and TV and stereo. Pressing a single button within the app can shut off all his lights and gadgets when he leaves.
Ramirez can tap a lamp in an image to turn an actual lamp off and on in his apartment, and at the same time he’ll see the picture on the tablet’s screen go dark or become illuminated. Ramirez also set up a presence-sensing feature that uses his cell phone to determine if he’s home (it checks whether or not he has connected to his home Wi-Fi network). This can automatically turn on the lights if he’s there. Ramirez runs the whole setup from a small computer in his home.
The software behind all this interconnection comes from a company called OpenRemote, which is plugging away on an open-source software platform for linking Internet-connected gadgets, making it easier to control all kinds of smart home devices, regardless of who made them. And it makes it easy to automate actions like lowering your connected window blinds if the temperature sensed in your living room goes above 75 degrees….
OpenRemote also sees a moneymaking opportunity beyond the home in providing its software to cities, which are becoming increasingly interested in using technology for everything from communicating with citizens to monitoring traffic. Last year, OpenRemote conducted a small test in Eindhoven, in hopes of using automation and crowdsourcing to monitor a city. This included people-tracking with cameras, sound-level tracking, social-media monitoring, and an app that people in the area could use to rate what the atmosphere was like. The company is currently working on a larger-scale project in Eindhoven, Kil says. “If you put four walls around a city, it’s a big room, if you know what I mean,” he says.”
The move toward 'crowdsourcing' public safety
PhysOrg: “Earlier this year, Martin Dias, assistant professor in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, presented research for the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System in which he examined Nlets’ network and how its governance and technology helped enable inter-agency information sharing. This work builds on his research aimed at understanding design principles for this public safety “social networks” and other collaborative networks. We asked Dias to discuss how information sharing around public safety has evolved in recent years and the benefits and challenges of what he describes as “crowdsourcing public safety.” …
What is “crowdsourcing public safety” and why are public safety agencies moving toward this trend?
Crowdsourcing—the term coined by our own assistant professor of journalism Jeff Howe—involves taking a task or job traditionally performed by a distinct agent, or employee, and having that activity be executed by an “undefined, generally large group of people in an open call.” Crowdsourcing public safety involves engaging and enabling private citizens to assist public safety professionals in addressing natural disasters, terror attacks, organized crime incidents, and large-scale industrial accidents.
Public safety agencies have long recognized the need for citizen involvement. Tip lines and missing persons bulletins have been used to engage citizens for years, but with advances in mobile applications and big data analytics, the ability of public safety agencies to receive, process, and make use of high volume, tips, and leads makes crowdsourcing searches and investigations more feasible. You saw this in the FBI Boston Marathon Bombing web-based Tip Line. You see it in the “See Something Say Something” initiatives throughout the country. You see it in AMBER alerts or even remote search and rescue efforts. You even see it in more routine instances like Washington State’s HERO program to reduce traffic violations.
Have these efforts been successful, and what challenges remain?
There are a number of issues to overcome with regard to crowdsourcing public safety—such as maintaining privacy rights, ensuring data quality, and improving trust between citizens and law enforcement officers. Controversies over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program and neighborhood watch programs – particularly the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, reflect some of these challenges. It is not clear yet from research the precise set of success criteria, but those efforts that appear successful at the moment have tended to be centered around a particular crisis incident—such as a specific attack or missing person. But as more crowdsourcing public safety mobile applications are developed, adoption and use is likely to increase. One trend to watch is whether national public safety programs are able to tap into the existing social networks of community-based responders like American Red Cross volunteers, Community Emergency Response Teams, and United Way mentors.
The move toward crowdsourcing public safety is part of an overall trend toward improving community resilience, which refers to a system’s ability to bounce back after a crisis or disturbance. Stephen Flynn and his colleagues at Northeastern’s George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security are playing a key role in driving a national conversation in this area. Community resilience is inherently multi-disciplinary, so you see research being done regarding transportation infrastructure, social media use after a crisis event, and designing sustainable urban environments. Northeastern is a place where use-inspired research is addressing real-world problems. It will take a village to improve community resilience capabilities, and our institution is a vital part of thought leadership for that village.”
Towards an information systems perspective and research agenda on crowdsourcing for innovation
New paper by A Majchrzak and A Malhotra in The Journal of Strategic Information Systems: “Recent years have seen an increasing emphasis on open innovation by firms to keep pace with the growing intricacy of products and services and the ever changing needs of the markets. Much has been written about open innovation and its manifestation in the form of crowdsourcing. Unfortunately, most management research has taken the information system (IS) as a given. In this essay we contend that IS is not just an enabler but rather can be a shaper that optimizes open innovation in general and crowdsourcing in particular. This essay is intended to frame crowdsourcing for innovation in a manner that makes more apparent the issues that require research from an IS perspective. In doing so, we delineate the contributions that the IS field can make to the field of crowdsourcing.
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Reviews participation architectures supporting current crowdsourcing, finding them inadequate for innovation development by the crowd.
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Identifies 3 tensions for explaining why a participation architecture for crowdsourced innovation is difficult.
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Identifies affordances for the participation architectures that may help to manage the tension.
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Uses the tensions and possible affordances to identify research questions for IS scholars.”
Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo
New paper by Michael J. Madison: “The knowledge commons research framework is applied to a case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis via the Internet. In the second place Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example of peer production, some times known colloquially as crowdsourcing, by which data are gathered, supplied, and/or analyzed by very large numbers of anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to an enterprise that is centrally coordinated or managed. In the third place Galaxy Zoo is a highly visible example of data-intensive science, sometimes referred to as e-science or Big Data science, by which scientific researchers develop methods to grapple with the massive volumes of digital data now available to them via modern sensing and imaging technologies. This chapter synthesizes these three perspectives on Galaxy Zoo via the knowledge commons framework.”
Are Some Tweets More Interesting Than Others? #HardQuestion
New paper by Microsoft Research (Omar Alonso, Catherine C. Marshall, and Marc Najork): “Twitter has evolved into a significant communication nexus, coupling personal and highly contextual utterances with local news, memes, celebrity gossip, headlines, and other microblogging subgenres. If we take Twitter as a large and varied dynamic collection, how can we predict which tweets will be interesting to a broad audience in advance of lagging social indicators of interest such as retweets? The telegraphic form of tweets, coupled with the subjective notion of interestingness, makes it difficult for human judges to agree on which tweets are indeed interesting.
In this paper, we address two questions: Can we develop a reliable strategy that results in high-quality labels for a collection of tweets, and can we use this labeled collection to predict a tweet’s interestingness?
To answer the first question, we performed a series of studies using crowdsourcing to reach a diverse set of workers who served as a proxy for an audience with variable interests and perspectives. This method allowed us to explore different labeling strategies, including varying the judges, the labels they applied, the datasets, and other aspects of the task.
To address the second question, we used crowdsourcing to assemble a set of tweets rated as interesting or not; we scored these tweets using textual and contextual features; and we used these scores as inputs to a binary classifier. We were able to achieve moderate agreement (kappa = 0.52) between the best classifier and the human assessments, a figure which reflects the challenges of the judgment task.”
New crowdsourcing platform links tech-skilled volunteers with charities
Charity Digital News: “The Atlassian Foundation today previewed its innovative crowdsourcing platform, MakeaDiff.org, which will allow nonprofits to coordinate with technically-skilled volunteers who want to help convert ideas into successful projects…
Once vetted, nonprofits will be able to list their volunteer jobs on the site. Skilled volunteers such as developers, designers, business analysts and project managers will then be able to go online and quickly search the site for opportunities relevant and convenient to them.
Atlassian Foundation manager, Melissa Beaumont Lee, said: “We started hearing from nonprofits that what they valued even more than donations was access to Atlassian’s technology expertise. Similarly, we had lots of employees who were keen to volunteer, but didn’t know how to get involved; coordinating volunteers for all these amazing projects was just not scalable. Thus, MakeaDiff.org was born to benefit both nonprofits and volunteers. We wanted to reduce the friction in coordinating efforts so more time can be spent doing really meaningful work.”