Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Posted by Jenn Lowther

Last night, Dario, Nadia, and myself went to the monthly ThirdTuesday meetup. Before the meeting, we decided to grab a bite to eat so that we’d be able to hear Monica over our grumbling stomachs. We decided to hit up The Greedy Pig in Gastown and we weren’t disappointed. We had an amazing dinner – from the ambiance and food to the server and company. Will definitely make a point of going there again.

This month, the meetup was on CrowdSourcing with the presentation given by Monica Hamburg of Your Dose of Lunacy and Me Like the Interwebs. The space was graciously donated by The Network Hub again and was sponsored by Rebbecca Bollwitt – our very own Miss604, who was also live blogging the event. The event was also live tweeted (not sure if I just made that name up) by Gregg Scott, you can find and read his live twitter stream here.

Monica started the evening by defining crowdsourcing, she defined it as (and I am totally paraphrasing here) ‘An act of taking a job and outsourcing it through an open call’. Crowdsourcing allows people to participate in your business and diversifies the point of view within a project. The crowdsourcing movement is similar to the opensource movement.

Some of the examples of crowdsourcing that Monica provided were Sell A Band, Threadless, Netflix – specifically they crowdsourced an improved algorithm for their movie recommendations, Lego Mindstorms, Google Image Tagger, Innocentive – used the example of Colgate/Palmolive crowdsourcing a better method of putting toothpaste into tubes, and NowPublic. What motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing.

• Passion (intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation)
• People want to be seen as an expert
• People want to feel connected and be part of a community

Failures that have resulted from crowdsourcing.

• Ask Space

The problem was a lack of funding. It was based on voting and people got passionate about the projects that they voted on and were disillusioned if there project didn’t receive enough votes to stay in the game. And finally, poor leadership.

• Assignment Zero

Not enough editors and a lack of overall organization.

Monica does have one pet peeve when it comes to crowdsourcing though, books. Books written through crowdsourcing tend to have a lack of a cohesive focus. The points that Monica gave us to take away from the presentation regarding crowdsourcing were:

• Leadership to moderate
• Be open to feedback
• Transparency and give people the information that they need
• Be upfront – what you expect from people and what they can expect from you
• Microchunk – break things down into small digestible sections
• Programming – The site needs to be engaging
• Know who you are targeting and make sure you have a demographic that will be open to social media

Main problems associated with crowdsourcing:

• Exploitation
• Submissions – ~90% will not be good
• Crowdsourcing isn’t a short term strategy and it needs to be nurtured
• It is not the answer to everything

Monica wrapped up with her final thoughts on the subject. The critical factors that affect a successful campaign are:

1. Passion
2. Community
3. Respect

This was a great evening and Monica did an awesome job informing us about crowdsourcing. Congrats Monica! If you want to read some more great coverage of the event, you can find it here - From Raul – there is also and awesome pic of me in my boots, here – From Rebecca, here - From Tanya, and here- from Monica.

Tags: crowdsourcing, monica hamburg, social media, thirdtuesday

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.