Crowdsourcing Innovation in Innovation Crowdsourcing (meta-enough, yet?)
This last weekend, at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes talking about collaboration and crowdsourcing with the great folks at GiveMeaning. I had a similar discussion with Jaison Morgan, of the X-Prize Foundation, in Santa Monica last fall. But sadly, these sorts of meetings seem to be few and far between.
By my last count, there are a few dozen web portals dedicated to crowd-sourcing, on the spectrum from ideation, through charity and into straight-up commerce and procurement. I should know - I run one of them. And yet, in a field defined by cooperation over competition, and the wisdom of the crowd over the supremacy of the individual, there is a noticeable glaring lack of communication between these companies.
Why? Here are the reasons I see:
- Everyone wants to own the conversation. Rather than wander over to Cambrian House’s (remarkably active) forums and talk about crowdsourcing, I’ve started my OWN forums, and seeded them with my OWN experts. This serves no one.
- A narrow perspective on the field as a whole. I believe OpenInnovators has tended towards this stance as well - of perceiving crowdsourced ideation as somehow uniquely distinct from other forms of crowdsourcing. The same separation seems to exist between charity projects, and commercial ones.
- Habit. In the same way that Radical Transparency runs counter to the instincts of traditional management, and Open Innovation seems to run counter to the instincts of traditional R & D, so too does collaboration with “competitors,” seem to run counter to the habits of even the most progressively-minded CEO.
- Time. Most of these companies are startups (or early-stage businesses) - which means they’re busy, if not swamped, with the day-to-day realities of being in business - and probably do not have the time to even realize, they’re part of an international movement.
What are we missing out on? What could be gained?
Perhaps the most exciting, and most challenging, part of working in collaboration - is that it’s truly NEW. This kind of international, cross-discipline and cross-domain participation simply wasn’t possible until very recently. Which means that, by and large, no one understands what we’re talking about. Crowdsourcing? Crowdfunding? Crowdcasting? Open this, open that, open source, open money, open innovation, open standards… open what?
Working together will help. In much the same way that hundreds of millions of people consume HTML and XML documents delivered via HTTP (often with SSL), routed over TCP/IP - without needing to understand what ANY of those acronyms mean, we need to “work together” to make the lexicon of “working together” understood. What the W3C did for the web, and the IEEE did for electronics, we can do for ourselves.
How do we do this?
In the traditional world, we would look to a third-party organization to bring us together, set the agenda, and lay down some ground rules. Even the web1.0 approach would suggest a conference, perhaps with a wiki and some happy-sounding press releases.
Instead, let’s go with the spirit of our underlying business model - open, transparent and Web 2.0-ish:
- Everyone plays in the playground. I’ve made a conscious decision to blog about this here, on Open Innovators, rather than on the BountyUp blog. I’d like to invite others to trackback this post, or talk to Philippe about a guest account and carry on the conversation.
- Tagging - I’ll be using “crowdincrowd” as a tag for blog posts, photos, twitter tweets, delicious bookmarks, and other content related to this. If you’re posting, please do the same. Spectators and participants alike can follow this here:
- On flickr
- On Twitter
- On Delicious
- In the blogosphere
Where do we go from here?
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Ben Hoyt said
am February 27 2008 @ 9:44 am
Hi Josh,
Thoughtful post.
We definitely didn’t set out to stifle the “crowdsourcing competition” — mainly we didn’t know it existed (much less did exist a year ago when we started out).
But I think you need another point on your “reasons” list: Each site has different features, and thinks they’re doing it better than the others (in certain ways, at least). I know we did, and still do think that to some extent.
We knew about PledgeBank when we started, but they didn’t do money handling. We’d seen Cambrian House, but again, it didn’t really do pledges/money (they do the ideas and commenting thing very well, though). There were others (Fundable, ChipIn) but they focussed mainly on fund-raising for charity stuff, whereas we focus on software, at present particularly open source.
Anyway, you’re right that all of us need to think more about working together. We’ve had some informal but friendly discussions with various players, but as soon as we get to talking about concretes and specifics, we get kinda stuck. I wonder if some kind of group chat between some of the players would be possible. Or is that what Open Innovators is intended to be?
Also: IMHO your title is too clever. I much prefer the more straight-forward title you gave it on del.icio.us: “Challenge to the ‘champions of collaboration’ — to collaborate themselves”.
Cheers,
Ben Hoyt (microPledge.com)
Joshua said
am February 27 2008 @ 8:15 pm
Ben,
I can honestly say that back in May of ‘06 (when we registered bountyup.com), I couldn’t find any discussion of social commerce or crowdsourcing at all, so I totally understand what you mean.
As far as featureset, and especially the separation between charitable and commercial projects, I understand what you’re saying. (Although IMO there’s more difference in user experience than featureset - BountyUp’s multiple contracts is an analog to the progressive payment scheme that you’ve developed, I think.) And in the spirit of good, old-fashioned capitalism, I think we should pursue those differences.
The specific project that I see as good ground for collaboration is in the LEXICON - the more we can establish, clarify and promote a universal set of user-friendly terms, the better it will be for ALL these projects.
Where we do it (and what tools we use) is still up in the air - hopefully I’ll be getting together again with the GiveMeaning folks in the next few weeks (watch http://barcamp.org/DemoCampVictoria for proposed dates, etc.) - and we can brainstorm on the “digital venue”. Some obvious options:
* Wiki
* IRC
* OpenInnovators blogging and comments
* Hack-and-slash of wikipedia entries (I started on Social Commerce, but it obviously needs a lot of work).
Other ideas?
Joshua
PS - Yeah, the title got a bit cutesy. I was going for “tongue-in-cheek” mockery of the mess of our terminology, and I missed.
Berwyn said
am February 28 2008 @ 1:16 am
One good collab mechanism would be for each of us crowd funders to be able to search all the other’s websites. This would be a boon for users because they’d effectively get more hits first up. Of course, a google search of all our sites would work, but we would want more sensible search results than google would give: it would have to include amount pledged, target, progress, etc. We could most easily write a search engine to do this if all of us agreed to release standard project info (probably in JSON).
What I’m imagining is that all pledge sites could implement a query where you could ask for a list of project fields changed or added since a specific date. The report would include title, subtitle, tags, amount pledged, target, progress, and optionally description and additional notes. This info would let a search engine search all crowdFunding sites in one hit with meaningful results — or browse by tag. The search engine would only have to fetch changed data once a day or so to update our indexes. We could each implement such a search engine on our own site. In fact, I’d be happy to collaborate in the development of search-engine code.
We may want to make it a condition of a crowdFunder being included in the search results that they also include all the others. We have to discuss boundaries.
In summary:
* all of us publish critical project facts in an agreed format
* all of us implement a search engine that searches all of our sites
Your idea of a wiki may be a good forum to post JSON output formats. Something that allows comments would be better for proposals & discussion: maybe even a blog entry here on openinnovators.