Crowdsourcing goes mainstream

Crowdsourcing is described by Wikipedia (whose founder hates the word) as:

“the out-sourcing of tasks traditionally done by a contractor or employee to a large group or community through an open call”.

It has been enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies in recent years but has a much, much longer history – Longitude was ‘discovered’ after a competition by the British Government in 1714. From a ‘geeky’ way of collaborating to solve tech problems, crowdsourcing has gone mainstream with the UK government’s appeal for help with cutting legislation.

I should declare an interest here. I am working with a business that uses crowdsourcing to generate revision, homework and practice questions to support learning. Zondle (http://www.zondle.com/publicPages/welcome.aspx) has generated over 17,000 questions in just under a year from a variety of sources; mainly GCSE teachers. However, increasingly students are adding their own questions. It’s 95% free and recently has had topics linked to the 11+ tests, phonics and even the citizenship test added to the bank.

Getting involved in this area has meant I have been particularly interested in any crowdsourcing project and have watched this ‘techie’ trait move more mainstream in recent months.

Curriculum Catalyst is a curriculum topic generator created by Tom Barrett (@tombarrett). Brilliantly, the crowd chooses the topic via a vote first (subjects nominated by the crowd too!) and then generates teaching ideas, links and supportive material through Twitter on a shared Google Document. Topics so far have included; castles, Sea Life, Endangered Species and Super Heroes. If you are teaching then its really worth having a look at this:
http://edte.ch/blog/2010/02/28/the-curriculum-catalyst-stage-1-add-your-ideas-and-votes

X-Factor is seen by the Twittering classes as a bit of a horror show; terrible acts, manufactured songs and routines and the ‘Jedward’ phenomenon definitely add to this description. However, X-Factor is a brilliant approach to crowdsourcing music.
Scenario: I am a record company manager who wants a Christmas number 1, a series of concerts plus album and DVD sales. I don’t really think A+R men are doing their job so I arrange a massive talent show (and televise it!), we take the raw talent (the work of the crowd) and mould it into something that works for mainstream pop fans. This leaves me to focus on sales and marketing and distribution. Brilliant.
If you’ve missed the X-Factor then here is the website:
http://xfactor.itv.com/2010/

It is clear how mainstream this approach has become with the launch of the Coalition Government’s Your Freedom initiative:
http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/
Your Freedom asks citizens to ‘free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations’. So, its a kind of crowdsourced cleaning out of bureaucratic and arcane laws. Rather than sourcing content or ideas or songs its crowdsourcing opinion and criticism. Some of the suggestions have been sensible, some less so and given that there are 411 suggestions about cannabis and just 330 about education one wonders how this is really working!

Given this explosion of crowdsourced ideas (and the difficulties faced by business to raise finance and therefore contractors or employees) one can only see the wisdom of the crowd becoming the norm in the future. I suspect we will get some gems like Curriculum Catalyst and some less important ideas like …

Filed under: Blog entries by ben