This page is dedicated to concisely summarizing information about crowdsourcing. In particular, we’ll use it to compile links to great crowdsourcing applications that may be a good fit for going mobile on The Extraordinaries mobile phone application. Please submit stuff we haven’t found in the comments!
What is crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or hired hand, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community. (quoted from the Wikipedia crowdsourcing page).
Where to learn more?
Check out the Wikipedia page above for sure. And definitely Check out Jeff Howe’s crowdsourcing blog. Howe coined the term in this article. You can also read Howe’s book and check out his video. Dude is smart and writes well to boot. There is also a great primer in simple language here.
Social Good Applications
Crowdsourcing for social good is a relatively new concept, but early experiments have shown tremendous promise. NASA’s Clickworkers project turned space enthusiasts into a high-powered work force. It took them a month to analyze 88,000 photos – a task that took a grad student 2 years to accomplish. ReCaptcha is transcribing old New York Times for the public good. And the World Wide Lexicon has created a system that enables the crowd to translate any written text. It could make mounds of public resources and information available to many more people. We’re just discovering the broad impact that crowdsourcing may have for the social good.
BirdPost: Report your bird sightings and seek out the bird sightings of others on satellite maps. Create an online list of your bird sightings that can be shared with friends. They’ve even just launched an iphone app!
ClickWorkers was a small NASA experimental project that used public volunteers (clickworkers) for scientific tasks that require human perception and common sense, but not a lot of scientific training. Clickworkers could work when and for how long they chose, doing routine analysis that would normally require months of work by scientists or graduate students. (source: Wikipedia). The site seems to be eternally down.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Looks like they’ve got a lot of GREAT crowdsourcing apps in progress. Here’s one: “CamClickr is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s newest and most innovative citizen science project yet! Conducted completely online CamClickr will allow participants to move through two levels of behavior classification in an effort to tag and code all of our archived images! Users choose the species and phase of the nesting cycle they want to start off with and then launch Level 1.”
Flickr Commons, is a project of Flickr in tandem with 17 public institutions to annotate collections of public photographs.
Galaxy Zoo: The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.
More than 150,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies, so to begin exploring the Universe, click the ‘How To Take Part’ link above, or read ‘The Story So Far’ to find out what Galaxy Zoo has achieved to date.. Video.
reCAPTCHA: is used for digitizing old texts, by providing the text (that can’t be deciphered properly by OCR software) to be read by end users of a CAPTCHA spam filter — those squiggly words that users must type on the Web when trying to “prove” they are human. reCAPTCHA is helping to digitize over 30 million words per day from the Internet Archive and the New York Times archive. (source: Wikipedia). Here is a slide show from von Ahn on ReCaptcha.
TxtEagle: Crowdsourcing for the rural poor in Africa via SMS – “There are over 1.5 billion literate, mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, many living on less than $3 a day. Corporations pay people to accomplish millions of simple text-based tasks. txteagle enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe.”
Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer “clickworkers” to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.
Wikipedia: you know and love it. It’s the shining crowdsourced jewel.
World Wide Lexicon: The Worldwide Lexicon, an open source project has a suite of collaborative translation tools that enable you or your readers to create, edit and share translations to and from almost any human language. Awesome. Awesome. O’reilly article on it.
Non-social Good Applications
The social good community would do well to learn from the private sector, which has realized that crowdsourcing is a business model that delivers untapped resources and value. Some companies have emerged that focus exclusively on crowdsourcing to create value such as Innocentive, a business that sources scientific problems to amateurs and sells the results to corporate clients. iStockPhoto has dominated the stock photo market in just a few short years by crowdsourcing photographs. More examples to come in this section.
Aardvark: Get fast answers over instant messaging or email. Aardvark finds the right friends (or friends-of-friends) for your questions. A real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can provide much better information than a web page. After all, there’s much more knowledge and experience in people’s heads than there is written on webpages. With Aardvark, there’s nothing to download or install — just send Aardvark a message through IM, just like you do when talking to a friend!
Creditworthiness Determined By Image Recognition
This is not actually an application, but an experiment done by a researcher. Worth reading the article in the Economist. Fascinating.
The ESP Game, Tag a Tune, Verbosity, Squigl, Matchin:
all “Games With a Purpose” (GWAP) by Luis von Ahn launched in 2004. ESP
Game gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game.
The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. Tag a
tune makes you describe a song. Verbiousity is word match. Squigl makes
you trace images, thereby identifying shapes within images. Matchin is
another image tagger. I’m not sure what von Ahn is doing with this data.
Get Satisfaction: crowdsourced customer service. We make your support resources vastly more efficient, matching customer queries to customer answers, answering common questions once, and putting company experts right in the middle of discussions that need them.
Google Image Labeler, a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.
GroundReport.com: is a global citizen journalism platform that allows anyone to post news reports, videos and photos and earn money. Every day Ground Report’s network of over 3,700 international contributors publish breaking news articles, videos and photos, which are vetted by a trusted corps of trained editors.
InnoCentive:
started in 2002, crowdsources research and development for biomedical
and pharmaceutical companies, among other companies in other
industries. InnoCentive, provides connection and relationship
management services between “Seekers” and “Solvers.” Seekers are the
companies searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are
the 125,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer
their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone with interest and Internet
access can become an InnoCentive Solver. Solvers whose solutions are
selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive,
which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered
with the Rockefeller Foundation to target solutions from InnoCentive’s
Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social
initiatives. (source: Wikipedia).
iStockPhoto: is an online, royalty free, international microstock photography provider operating with the micropayment business model. Images cost between 1 and 20 credits, depending on size (with credits ranging from $.95 to $1.40 USD [1] each). General consensus attributes the pioneering of the microstock photography industry to iStockphoto, which claims to be “internet’s original member-generated image and design community.”
iReport: citizen journalism. “That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post. Only stories marked “On CNN” have been vetted for use in CNN news coverage.” [ben's comment: seems like it could actually use more curating... somewhere in this process - even if by other users]
MapShare:
TomTom’s unique Map Share technology enhances your navigation
experience, because you can now make instant changes directly on your
map. You can also receive similar changes made by the entire TomTom
community.
MobMerge: a user friendly front-end to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Currently in beta.
Threadless: Yea, this is the best of the best non-social-good crowdsourcing effort. A clothing retailer, sells T-shirts which have been designed and rated by members of the public. They always sell out because the crowd tells them which shirts to produce.
It's incredibly powerful to see the true nature of why people have chosen one path over another, and what motivates them to exist. As we begin to understand people's motivations, we discover something beautiful about each other: That we all share a common thread. 
In part three of "when to use The Extraordinaries" I explore the time we spend waiting for haircuts. 
