Web's Largest listing of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding events
Web's Largest Directory of Sites2,358 crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites
A PhD dissertation, "Understanding Crowdsourcing" by Irma Borst sub-titled "Effects of Motivation and Rewards on Participation and Performance in Voluntary Online activities, was...
When Seth Priebatsch, CEO at SCVNGR, delivered his audaciously provocative presentation at TED he was talking about how to motivate the crowd when money isn’t the currency. You can call the approach of rewarding certain online behaviors (or penalizing others) 'Gamification', 'Game Mechanics', or 'Social Rewards', all are being equally banded about and are receiving lots of buzz. Whatever you call it, it’s all about the motivation of the masses...we’ll call it Gamification.
The options for presenting a range of digital incentives and rewards is theoretically infinite but the primary design elements include motivational triggers such as: positive (and possibly immediate) feedback (e.g. a sound that quickly becomes recognizable upon the successful completion of a task); noticeable advancement through the “game” upon successfully performing the work (e.g. progression to a new level); awarding points, badges, and status levels, etc. (see Gowalla, GetGlue or Foursquare).
Gamification however can be about much more than just driving online engagement by awarding users tokens that represent their various levels of achievement – some refer to this type of consumer engagement as 'Pouring Chocolate on Broccoli' (a very Germanic expression meaning to simply spice something up that is a bit boring). Used in this manner, the greater potential of using Gamification is somewhat lost.
In 2000, a college student named Jake Nickell entered a t-shirt design contest hosted by Dreamless.org, a (now defunct) online forum for web programmers and graphic designers. The winning design would become the official t-shirt of a Dreamless event in London. Out of about 100 entries, Nickell’s design won the contest.
Jacob DeHart, another college student with a passion for design, also entered the competition. Though his design didn’t win, he and Nickell (who had met through the forum) began to talk about how much fun it was to participate in the contest. “Dreamless was all about art and design and a lot of artists on there had 'battles' and shared/critiqued their work with each other,” wrote Nickell in a blog post entitled ‘ Threadless.com: The History’. “It was all around a very creative environment for hobbyists and professionals alike to unleash some creativity in their free time.” That got the two thinking: what if they held an ongoing design contest where the winning t-shirts would go on sale? Soon, Threadless was born.
Archability aims to help clients looking for architecture and design solutions, and to provide a project marketplace for skilled professionals. We caught up with the platform's founder and CEO, Livingstone Mukasa, to discuss the motivations behind his platform and why now, more than ever, it can become an essential service for thousands of individuals.
Can you find rational investors without first attracting the emotionally-motivated ones? Paul Niederer offers his thoughts on the "third-level survivorship" concept that we recently wrote about.
Is crowdourcing scalable? Yes. Powerful enabler of a successful business if developed the right way, absolutely! Awesome pool of cheap labor? Not so much. My guess is that anyone working in a (successful) business that is designed around or at least is heavily reliant upon crowdsourcing, feels that the crowd isn’t cheap labor. On a practical basis this sentiment is easily evolved into the well-intentioned mantra you can hear echoing through the halls here at Trada, “the crowd doesn’t work for us… don’t ever treat them like they do! We work for them!”
It has been argued that funding was particularly difficult to obtain for small businesses in respect of their size and lack of available historical data creating information asymmetry for potential investors. Hence, traditional financing methods like bank loans, business angels or VCs are out of reach for these small companies. Moreover, bootstrapping does not allow businesses to grow fast due to its focus on cash generation, often at the expense of maximizing value creation. As a result, crowdfunding can become a viable fundraising method obtainable for small entrepreneurial companies or project-based initiatives.
Crowdsourcing.org recently connected with Marina Miranda from Colaboratorie Mutopo, a social production company that brands itself as “thinkers, makers, builders, designers, and producers who believe in the power of collaboration”. Miranda leads Mutopo’s business in Brazil, and shared some insight on the company’s vision there.
Developed by two idealistic Canadians and two open-minded Americans, the Cloud Labor platform CloudFactory, lauched this week in San Francisco, is an ambitious project based in Kathmandu, Nepal, with an objective to bring new opportunities of work to people in developing countries to help fight poverty.
Crowdsourcing.org had the opportunity to interview Tom Puskarich, VP Business Development of CloudFactory while he was in San Francisco for the launch of the platform at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference. We learned that CloudFactory is following a similar model to established providers such as CrowdFlower, Microtask and others. CloudFactory allows businesses to design virtual assembly lines for all types of digital work such as inputting data from handwritten forms, extracting data from images, flagging bad content and categorizing things. However, “The main difference between CloudFactory and its competitors is its free self-serve toolset that allows users to set-up their own workflows” Tom Puskarich, VP Business Development, informed us.
Crowdfunding, the latest way for start-ups to raise capital in order to launch their products/services, has enjoyed quite a bit of attention recently. Instead of looking for angels and investors to plough large sums of money into their businesses (and be eligible for a return when the company has future liquidity events or IPOs), many would-be entrepreneurs are taking the crowdfunding route. This makes great sense in many ways, one of the most important being that the company founder(s) maintain total control over the business, allowing them to adhere closely to their original ideas and visions.
I first came across the concept of crowdfunding a couple of years ago when I discovered Kickstarter and watched a short video made by the guys who were trying to launch the social network Diaspora, a viable alternative to Facebook that allows users to maintain full ownership of their content. I was so impressed by the enthusiasm of the group and the initiative shown by these really young guys (and the fact that I have children of a similar age) that I donated to the project. This made me wonder what makes other people donate to crowdfunded projects.
Spidvid founder Jeremy Campbell shares some lessons on crowdsourcing and online video.
Investors have continued to pour money into crowdsourcing platform uTest, which has grown at a remarkable clip in its first four years, but where does it grow from here?
Companies who want to take advantage of crowdsourced design must fully commit to the model, and not hold it at arm's length or treat it as a fad. Crowdsourcing doesn't mean a dilution of ideas, or a homogenization. It can lead to inspired solutions to complex problems, as long as the crowd is allowed to be a crowd. After all, while horses may be sleek and elegant, sometimes a good hump is exactly what you need.
For inventors and startups with limited time and resources, navigating the intellectual property landscape can be a sluggish and confusing affair. Taavi Raidma, co-founder and CEO of CrowdIPR, hopes to streamline the IP research process. Currently in private beta, CrowdIPR utilizes the collective work and wisdom of a crowd of IP experts to help startups and entrepreneurs determine the novelty and potential infringements of their product ideas.
Over the past decade, Open Innovation has emerged as a leading business trend that has transformed the way enterprises approach all aspects of product development, from R&D through marketing and branding and even to post-sales support. By “opening the doors” to new ideas generated by others outside their own walls (including in many cases their customers!), companies have found new ways to leverage external knowledge to build better products.
To compete in the Ocean Health X Prize, winners must be able to build and demonstrate the most accurate and reliable deep ocean pH sensors to help measure the global effects of climate change on...
This guest post comes to Crowdsourcing.org from Brian Koles of ChallengePost, a platform for contests and competitions in software development and open government. He offers us half a dozen tips for conducting a public competition that will get results.
Not only the for-profit sector has been taking advantage of crowdsourced labor. Increasingly, platforms are offering NGOs the ability to tap into large groups of volunteers to complete small back office tasks, enabling cash-strapped organizations to make their workload more manageable.
There are a few critical criteria which need to be addressed to successfully integrate crowd testing concepts into corporate test strategies. Dieter Speidel of passbrains.com shares his thoughts in this guest post. (Sponsored Post)
A year ago, George Washington University professor David Alan Grier made some predictions about where crowdsourcing would be in a year. Now that those predictions have come true, we spoke with him to review the year in crowdsourcing and look forward.
Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
