It's Not About The Crowd

I’m really excited for the conversation I’ll be having with Edward Boches in Boston entitled All About Crowdsourcing on the August 5th.  To prepare, I’ve been having lots of interesting conversations with folks on the subject. One thing that constantly surprises me is the amount of emotion around crowdsourcing. It’s made me reflect on what’s happening at a deeper level. It feels like I’ve seen this disruptive play before. On a long bike ride yesterday it came to me.

I started my first company in 1986. It was based on a radical paradigm shift and I was able to take advantage of it. I decided to buy a magazine, Rocky Mountain Running News to use it as the foundation to start a larger magazine entitled, Rocky Mountain Sports. The purchase was only possible because of a radical shift in technology. Instead of paying $35,000 for typesetting, annually, I was able to buy a Mac Plus, a 20MB hard drive and a laser writer for $23,000.  I was also able to get a beta version of Quark. Then, it was essentially a type setting program for macs. That seems surreal now, doesn’t it?

So, there I was trying to figure out how to typeset my magazine. It was trial by fire.  I was a complete amateur. While I didn’t need our typesetting house for the body copy of the magazine, I still used them for the occasional ad.

The first few issues turned out much better than I thought they would. But, you should have heard the professional typesetters. When they saw the issues they just laughed and talked about what awful kerning and leading the magazine had and that the choice of type was horrible. Every time we talked they said, “This amateur desktop publishing thing will never work. You’ll be back.”

We all know how the story ended.

My sense is that we are in the midst of another such revolution. This time, it’s all about connectivity. Now people can participate in culture by going on line. They don’t have to move to the right city or work for the right company to be involved. It doesn’t matter whether their an amateur or a professional, people now have the ability to work where they want, with whom they want and how they want. We’re evolving, as Eric Raymond so aptly put it, into a world ruled by the creative bazaar instead of the world of cathedrals that agencies have created.

You can call it crowdsourcing, co-creation or open source innovation, the crowd is here is to stay and will produce more and more creative content. The big questions are: How do you manage and inspire the crowd? How do you make meaning from all of their input? How do you build brands in such a noisy environment?

I hope you can help answer some of these questions with us either in person or via Twitter.

Comments

[edwardboches]

John:
Looking forward to our chat. The big challenger of course is this: true crowdsourcing, or peer production, is about lots of people breaking up a big task into smaller pieces. Works great for debugging code. Question is, can it work for creativity, where ideas are often inspired by an individual and brought to life via collaboration, people working closely together to create one thing, not taking the one thing and all doing a little piece of it. Will it be manageable? In Nicholas Carr's piece about Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." he closes with this statement, "So if you’re looking to bolster your company’s creativity, you should by all means look for opportunities to harness the power of the crowd. Just don’t expect the masses to take the place of the lone wizard or the band of mages. The greatest breakthroughs will always begin, to quote Eric Raymond once more, with “one good idea in one person’s head,” and the greatest products will always reach perfection through the concerted efforts of a highly skilled team." Lots to talk about.

[steven kydd]

John/Edward,

To the question "can it work for creativity"...the answer is YES. Albeit through a combination of the models you describe above.

At DemandStudios.com we create thousands of pieces of original text and video content EACH DAY by breaking the content creation process into discrete tasks and manage the process through our online publishing platform. For example, for a single article to appear on one of our a sites like Livestrong.com, we employ a title proofer, a title reviewer, a writer, and a copy editor/fact-checker from our Demand Studios community. In this case, multiple creators (who have all been pre-qualified by our editorial team) are collaborating to produce a high-quality piece of content. A similar process happens with video production -- albeit with video Q/A and transcription added to the mix.

Our unique model has attracted thousands professional freelancers from around the country -- and we have paid out almost $15MM to our team. Our Demand Studios Manifesto outlines our philosophy in greater detail
http://www.demandstudios.com/manifesto.html

It is also working for partners like YouTube. We are their largest content contributor in the world with over 165,000 videos -- and we don't own a single camera. The model is working so well they chose us as their first-ever YouTube Success Story http://www.youtube.com/t/partnerships_success

Crowdsourcing and creativity are working at scale for us. I'd welcome the opportunity to share more ideas with you -- and receive critical feedback on our approach.

Steven

[Brett T. T. Macfarlane]

What a great sounding discussion, wish I could be there.

While I agree with Edward creative ideas as we know them generally are initially born from a single mind what will be interesting will be what sort of new forms of creative ideas will emerge with crowdsourcing.

As one example a couple weeks ago I did a salon with author/artist Douglas Coupland, currently working on his followup to Generation X, and he is fascinated by what he calls fractal storytelling. How new forms of stories are being created by many bits created by many people forming together, sometimes coordinated, often times not.

It is early days for crowdsourcing, will be amazing to see what kind of ideas it generates in the years to come.

I look forward to piecing together the contents of the event through the fragments of content posted by attendees.