Amy Sample Ward NetSquared
	Beth Kanter Beth's Blog
	David J Neff Lights.Camera.Help.
	Holly Ross NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Network
	Kari Saratovsky The Case Foundation

Short stories about crowd sourcing

Beth
Beth started a blog called spider school. She was writing about how nonprofits can use the web. She would get emails from people she didn’t know pointing out grammar errors and typos. She decided to start a feature called spider school police and give a digital badge to anyone who found typos or errors.

Amy
NetSquared facilitates offline events all around the world. Amy organizes a group in her city, and she tries to ask people to speak, but people don’t self-select to speak. One month we didn’t have any speakers, so we asked people for recommendations. They came through with programming for a whole year.

Holly
It’s been imperative for NTEN to utilize the community to keep up with technology trends.

Kari
Case Foundation opened up to the public and encouraged them to get involved in the grant solicitation. People provided feedback on applications, and they finally did a crowdsourced vote of who should get grants.

David
David has recruited volunteers. He has also built a website to allow people to tell their cancer stories including stories, video, and artwork.

About the panel
All the content for this session has been crowdsourced, including the powerpoint presentation. They launched a social media for social good case studies. It had a submission form which they opened in January. They had a ranking system so that people could rate the case studies. We selected case studies based on that ranking and the focus of the panel. They didn’t have funding for the panel, and it actually took very little effort to demonstrate to nonprofits how easy it is.

The Hybrid Model
The hybrid model has been a popular method of crowdsourcing. There is some good and some bad that comes in when you start crowdsourcing. The hybrid model has some responsibility with “experts” and some responsibility with the crowd.

Freerange Studios
Freerange Studios did a project called utopia where they did $30K worth of free work. Anyone could enter, the audience narrowed it down to the top twenty, and then they made the final decision for which project they wanted to work on.

Seattle Free School
The Seattle Free School uses social media as the entire operation mechanism. The idea is that it’s free to teach and learn within the community. It’s how they operate and how they grow. They use social media to distribute the roles of the members, so there’s no mail or fliers. It was even created through social media.

Invisible People
Invisible people is very good at story telling, helping people understand that homeless people aren’t different or scary. They crowdsourced who they should interview. The most amazing thing about the project is that he is unafraid to look away from an issue that almost everyone else looks away from.

Open Green Map
Open Green Map helps communities map themselves. Community members can enter any locations they consider to be green, like bike racks, eco-friendly restaurants, etc. The whole project is open source, so you can take the code and use it for any mapping project. They are actually creating change in their community.

Trends in submitted projects
The organizations who participated were not household names. Most of them mentioned that they had no marketing budget, and they relied on the power of social media and their communities.

Open Street Map
Open Street Map allowed people to add streets to a map. It is the main application being used by relief organizations to share which roads are accessible and blocked.

The Uptake
The Uptake covers Minnesota politics, and they livestream and let people comment in real time. Using the time stamp on the comments, the editors could easily find the video highlights and put them together.

When does crowdsourcing suck?
Anytime the legal department is involved. Any time you are writing by-laws or mission statements – things that need to be carefully worded and come from within the organization.

How can we use crowdsourcing to add value to the target population?
Crowdsourcing is one of the values that we have as social change organizations. We have to live by our values, and not just voting online, but actual online collaboration. The community will tell you what sort of research they want to accomplish together.

How do you prevent crowdsourcing from being a resource suck?
Crowdsourcing within a community is already part of the way a community operates. If you’re crowdsourcing to the crowd, you’re probably doing something simple like an online vote.

Netflix prize
Netflix has offered a prize to individuals who can improve their recommendation algorithms.

How do you convince your senior management that some of the best ideas come from outside your organization?
There are huge benefits to build community. You are bringing great people into the process. If your management doesn’t get it, then quit and bring your resources to an organization that gets it.

How do the panelists define crowdsourcing?

Amy
I’m not the best at everything, and I have to trust people outside my brain and empower them. An expert is someone who has a really good network.

Holly
Some problems should be solved by experts, but sometimes experts lack diversity that only large crowds can provide.

Kari
It’s a recognition that you can tap a wider audience than might exist in your own organization.

Jeff
There are smart people outside your organization. You should tap that potential.

How do you get people to work for free?
It provides value to them. They get to work with a community, which makes everyone more effective and efficient. But you shouldn’t ask for people to provide professional services for free. That’s disrespectful.

Prompt:

The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.

Essay:

No generation has produced more data than today’s youth. Never has so much information gushed from an oppressed people than that which the youth of Iran are broadcasting to the rest of the planet. It is infinitely easier for this generation of youth to understand each other than it has been for any generation in the history of the world. If you wish to understand contemporary culture, the only place to look is to the youth of today.

Instant communication on a global scale has allowed today’s youth to lay bare their lives and their cultures out for all to see. Lest we discount the significance of this fact, remember just a generation ago when a convincing argument could be made that our political enemies are monsters who are nothing like us. The average American, or Iranian, could not fly to the other side of the world to see if these claims were valid. Today’s youth wake up and read messages from friends in six different countries before they get out of bed.

Contemporary culture, however, is a misleading term. When the lines of communication were not so direct, we used representatives like actors and politicians to describe our culture, and our culture appeared more homogenous. It was only possible to buy the books that were carried in your town, so in fact, culture back then actually was more homogenous. Today’s youth see no point in representatives. Why would youth allow an actor or politician to represent them to the world, when it’s simple and easy to represent themselves? The youth of today can order any book they like, and it’s caused them to have a multitude of nuanced perspectives. There is no such thing as contemporary culture anymore. Today’s youth speak with a thousand voices to describe a thousand different cultural backgrounds and experiences.

If culture is so varied, how can we ever hope to understand it? There are several academic projects seeking to answer this question. It is not a question to be taken lightly. Can we look at the backlash from the Iran election, at the terrabytes of data that flowed from Iran in the weeks following that momentous event and draw any meaningful conclusions? We can. There was anger. There was pain. There was fear. These are the places where the many different cultures of Iran coalesced and agreed. We know this because we listened carefully to the many voices of the youth.

Today’s youth have powerful voices. They do not have a homogeneous culture, and the clarity with which we can understand them is sometimes cloudy and fleeting, but if we support more research in this area, if we are willing to try and willing to fail, our understanding will grow over time. This volume of data is a wholly unexpected glut of chaos that the human race has never seen the likes of, but we must break it down into its parts. We must understand it, and in doing so, we will gain a greater understanding of each other.

Sarah: The internet has had a revolutionary effect on societies worldwide, yet academia seems to have utterly failed at documenting and studying it. Why is this such a difficult field to study and how can we get solid research on the ecology of the web?
Tim: The classic response to this is one you really hear a lot: stodgy old ivory-tower fogies don’t think the internet (and internet culture in particular) is important enough to study. While I think there is some truth in that stereotype, I have to say that I think there’s more to the story than just that — after all, there’s plenty of progressive, “with-it” folks in academia that see the value in exploring this space. In spite of this, the fact that universities remain slow to pick up on digital stuff I think suggests a deeper problem in the organizational element of the whole picture. The hierarchies of authority, the standards around publication, and the flexibility of creating and halting projects, all conspire to make it difficult for academia to keep up with the changing ecosystem of the web. Moreover, academic institutions are locked in a system of grants that often tie their hand with regards to what they can spend money on and invest in, which makes them inflexible and slow. We’ve been trying to experiment with new organizing models with The Web Ecology Project, and have been really excited about how things have been going.

Sarah: #iranelection seems to be the first meme that went globally mainstream. It worries me that the meme was almost entirely dependent on Twitter. They could have been DDoS’d or hacked, or paid to shutdown for a week. Are memes vulnerable to their platforms, or would the meme have carried on elsewhere if the platform went down?
Tim: Luckily, memes often aren’t completely platform dependent, so that the shutting down of any particular online space where cultural phenomena is happening won’t necessarily kill it completely. That being said, it’s true that certain platforms make particular activities /easier/ and that the amount of influence or attention that a space commands (or a given user commands in that space) is significant in powering the spread of a practice or an idea online. The “leakage” of memes depends to some extent on the the ease of users to adopt new platforms or their existing membership across platforms. So, there’s a bunch of variables — all told, it looks like from our research that it depends alot on the particulars of a situation. For the Iran Election, I think odds are it would have appeared elsewhere (though potentially in less visible spaces), given the media attention and the activist activity surrounding the event.

Sarah: Where do you see the future of nonprofits moving? It seems like we have to be increasingly agile to move at the speed of the web, to the point that restraints such as narrow mission statements or hierarchical management structures simply can’t compete. You’re involved in the Awesome Foundation, which has just about the broadest mission statement I’ve seen and zero management structure. Is that the future? Can it get even more agile than that?
Tim: The Awesome Foundation tries to keep it real. How many times have people applied for grants, only to try to cloak their real intentions of “hey wow wouldn’t it be great if…” from the granting organization? We’ve tried to eliminate that, make it easy for people to be honest about what they want support to do. There’s an advantage in that, particularly as we’ve tried to pursue lightweight structures that make it dead simple to apply and get money (we actually give the money directly, in cash). Think there’s two possibilities going into the future. One is to be exceedingly lightweight and broad, essentially what we’ve done with the Awesome Foundation. The other is to go entirely the other way — to craft incredibly narrow, incredibly curated groups. However, both of these disperse anti-foundation foundation models have only experimented with relatively small groups and small stakes so far. I think a big question going forwards is — can this scale? How much larger can these models get in terms of people and dollar amounts before they break down? Or is the future just an enormous, disperse framework of highly nimble granting groups? One thing seems clear: old non-profits seem increasingly slow to jump on supporting emerging efforts at the earliest stage.

Sarah: How do we solve copyright?
Tim: Sure, there’s GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, and a whole host of thought, projects (and arguments of the most vicious kind) that have gone into trying to figure out how to repair the structure of intellectual property more generally. Beyond quibbling about the details or whether so-and-so solution is better than that-or-this proposal, I think what all of them have in common is so key is to view the law as a space to be innovated on and experimented with. There’s an inherent risk-averseness to the law and lawyers, and a norm that limits the extent to which people feel they can craft new entities within the law. Though really, there’s no reason for that — even such established entities as “the Corporation” were the creations of legal innovation (really, legal hacking) at some point. This is what’s kept copyright behind as the entire environment has shifted around it — I think what’s necessary is for a shift in thinking about the law as open-ended to possibility and active manipulation in the same way Creative Commons constructed a new interface with the law, rather than something that’s a closed and static.

Sarah: What is it about the internet that makes some people incredibly vitriolic? What is the driving motivation behind youtube comments and death threats to prominent bloggers? Can we change the motivation structure somehow to make people more humane without sacrificing anonymous speech?
Tim: There’s two parts to this. On one hand, there’s some sense that the vitriol and assholery that typifies YouTube comments are actually just part and parcel of the aesthetics of communication on the web. So, there’s a part of me that says to not feed the trolls, take it in stride, move on, etc etc. On the other of course, this flavor of social interaction on the web is occasionally at odds with getting things done, and as you mentioning can be bordering on real danger in the form of death threats or otherwise. Not to make light of this, but I’ve always been fond of Randall Munroe’s proposal of having YouTube comments read back to you before they are posted. It points at the need to leverage design features in online spaces to adjust and shape human interaction. We’ve been looking into this at the Berkman Center with Yochai Benkler’s work — the general idea is to examine a broad range of cases in a quantitative way, and figure out the relationship between these structural features and how people collaborate (or don’t) together.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Willow, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Willow on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community. Today is the last day to vote!

Sarah: What is a hacker space, and how can it change the world?
Willow: Hacker spaces are communal places of tools and loud noises. They are a place to take things apart without fear of being reprimanded, a place to afix together a Frankenstein’s Monster of tech that makes you giggle madly at the thought of it working. Hacker spaces are a sort of gateway into exploring everything. By encouraging the taking apart of “closed” objects – things that have been marketed to us as inaccessible and to be left for the experts – we can begin to form mindsets which make exploration and understanding necessary joys in life. Anything which was considered “off limits” becomes a puzzle to figure out and do better. This includes politics, education systems, personal relationships, and anything else one might consider. Hacker spaces are the speakeasys in a culture that demands experts for even the most trivial situation.

Sarah: Do you think our generation has a fundamentally different concept of communication from previous generations? How does our communication style change the way we interact with each other?
Willow: I believe every generation has a different way of communicating than the ones before them. Ours is more radical, yes, but the next generation will be even more so. Asynchronous, documentable conversation leads to more self-reflection (it’s difficult to read a letter you’ve sent to someone across the country, unless you made a copy for yourself, but now we can read old chat logs and sent e-mails) and a revisiting of ideas. Our memories – once hazy, slightly shared, mostly constructed ideas of past events – are now clearly defined through stored chats and phone photos. We share our memories with people who weren’t there. While our perspectives and intents remain fluid, our shared experience becomes more solid.
We can also now hold conversations with a multitude of people, with timing as little issue and geography even less so. I believe that while this has a tendency to spread the psyche a bit thinner than in the past, it’s similar to laying on a bed of many small nails… much more supportive than fewer, albeit larger, connection points.

Sarah: It seems to me that it’s harder now than ever before to be “in the closet” about anything. How have generation y conceptions of privacy changed social, academic, and office dynamics?
Willow: The American desire and demand to be revered as an individual makes being in the closet about anything less appealing than remaining inside. Many of the people I know, myself included, treat social media as something to be used responsibly and with an eye to privacy, but also as social space. If someone goes looking for questionable pictures on your Facebook, it’s similar to your boss visiting a bar they’ve heard you frequent to see how you behave. There is much more acknowledgment that many individuals put on their cog costume for enough time to support the lifestyle and activities they truly enjoy. More and more successful companies realize their employees are a wide range of eclectic individuals, and enhance their businesses through relishing that fact.

Sarah: How will embeddable (embeddable in flesh, that is) computers change the way we live?
Willow: I like to explain it in terms of oxygen tech and opaque tech. Oxygen technology is stuff you use without having to think about it. Opaque tech you notice every little thing involving that piece. When my phone is on vibrate and in my pocket, and someone texts me while I’m having a face-to-face conversation with someone else, while I know I’ve received a text, that knowledge doesn’t detract at all from my attention to the person I’m conversing with. Having a ringer on would disrupt the conversation – it’s opaque. I have to interact with it in a very obvious manner in order to process the information it’s giving me. Having embeddable technology is like that pocket vibration. You don’t have to notice it much to make a lot of use of the information it gives you. It’s in your peripheral mind’s eye. In short, we’ll be processing a lot more information without having to pay as much conscious attention to it.

Sarah: How do you motivate community and face-to-face interaction between people who primarily live their lives online?
Willow: Where2.0 is doing a very good job with this, and augmented reality will fill the gap. As we tag our physical environments, create point systems based on interacting with them, augment the reality we have at hand, the line between online and meatspace slowly goes away. We’ve always been impacting our environment with constructed signs and shaping it with our tools… we’re just continuing in that direction. Maybe someday I’ll talk to a hologram (or HUD display) of a friend across the globe. Maybe a geographically local friend will hand me a link to her new favorite book while we play chess at a tea shop. I think the important thing is the connectivity and the respect we give people we care about.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Willow, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Willow on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community.

Photo credit: Libby Bulloff

The article certainly references the major league players of my generation – Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Creative Commons, the Pirate Party, et al, but it’s aimed at my mother’s generation.

Quoth Kelly:

I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

There certainly are unsoiled terms waiting to be created, but if we insist on using an existing term, “socialism” is a strange one to attach to internet culture.

Quoth Wikipedia:

Socialism refers to any one of various theories of economic organization advocating state or cooperative ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of B.S., and a society characterized by equal opportunities/means for all individuals with a more egalitarian method of compensation based on the full product of the laborer.

The internet culture to which Kelly refers has little “cooperative ownership” and less “compensation.” If we insist on comparing internet culture to a system of state governance, benevolent anarchy might be a more suitable fit.

But if you talk to people who are enmeshed in internet culture, who spend hours editing Wikipedia, and producing articles (like this one) intended to go directly into the public domain, you will find that we don’t use the terms socialism or anarchy to describe our culture. This is a Revolution.

What Keven Kelly fails to grasp is that this is not the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; this is not a logical progression from Paine and Marx, as his cute infographics would suggest. This is an irreversible shift in the way that humanity understands and interacts with itself. Internet culture is like nothing we have seen before in human behavior.

All generations, I know, would believe that they are New and Different, but consider Iran. What other American generation has watched, hands to hearts, breaths collectively held, hours of footage, hundreds of pictures, thousands of tweets coming in real time from individual citizens on the other side of the planet? What other generation has interacted with itself in this way? People under 30 all over the globe are donning their green ribbons and wrist bands, because this isn’t about politics (mostly). It’s about Revolution.

Internet culture has brought Generation Y together across all borders. Some of us are passionate about unalienated labor and free rational inquiry, but most of us have never read about them. Most of us were simply taught that sharing and helping is the right thing to do. Our generation is the first to have been given the incredible means to publish worldwide instantly. So the question of whether we can help humanity isn’t an overwhelming and daunting one as it was to our parents, it’s a question of whether we have five minutes to hop on Wikipedia and contribute some research. It just so happens that sharing and helping on a global scale can tear down dictatorships, expose corruption, and heal a planet that for too long has suffered from division and misinformation.

In short, while Mr. Kelly is right that there are elements of socialism woven into the fabric of the internet, its bedrock is Revolution.

The internet has its own self-referential universe of memes. Lolcats is one of the most virulent memes that has ever existed. It has a computer code, it has a wiki-translation of the bible, and it has become it’s own language that has spread throughout nearly every other meme online. What aspects of memes cause them to spread or die?

Recessions are great for internet culture. Lots more people are able to consume and create memes when they are unemployed. Twitter, Etsy, and Vimeo have all had hugely increased traffic since the recession started in October.

Can you hack internet culture? Are there reliable tactics to become “internet famous”? Can we have a “social net neutrality” that ensures that memes organically spread rather than being pushed by a small group of people who know how to hack the system?

Originally, personal computers merely ran any executable code that you asked them to run. What would have happened if someone had distributed bad code? They could have taken down several computers, but for 20 years, no one did. Today’s pcs have huge stacks of software running at any given time, and their users don’t know which ones are good and which ones are bad. Since computers are increasingly networked, and we’ve legislated to allow ecommerce, we now have a huge motivation to distribute bad code – money.

Steve Jobs has said that the beauty of the iPhone is that Apple can control it, meaning it’s nothing like the pc because no one can send you bad code. Even after the app store launched, Apple approves all apps available in the app store to protect its users. But that gives apple the power to deny any app at any time. Apple can pull the plug on any app you use without explanation. In fact, Apple has denied apps merely because they seem to be pointless and they might offend part of the user base (case in point: a Bush presidency countdown clock that was denied). What would Wikipedia be now if they had denied everything that might be offensive or pointless? The same thing is happening with Facebook apps.

Our devices are now “updating” themselves to be things quite different from what we bought. What if your toaster got an upgrade and suddenly started making orange juice? We are no longer purchasing devices we control (like the pc), we are merely paying to enter into enigmatic breakfast-oriented relationships.

Contractually, Apple could reprogram all iphones over the air to turn on their mics and send the ambient noises back to Apple. They wouldn’t even have to tell users that they did this. We would only know that our batteries aren’t lasting as long as they used to.

What do we do? We can all report to each other what software we are running and what software our “experts” are running, so that when someone tells your computer to run code, you have some idea of whether that code is new or old or common or rare. That would be a good start.

My takeaways from Dave Olson‘s sxsw panel:

The internet allows us to ensure a redundancy of information that the physical world can never have. We tear down our modern-day pyramids, but our blogs are duplicated and recorded and archived. We are passing our every word down to future generations. What are we passing down? How much intent and integrity and heart do we put into our digital productions?

Our past heroes have put their entire lives into their work. Has anyone done that online? Is there a digital Thoreau? Will we discover a currently neglected philosophy blogger in a hundred years and suddenly realize that we ignored someone whose ideas would come to change the world?

Embark on personal archeology. What projects have you completed in the past that have no digital presence? Put them online. Share them. Pass them on to your peers and future generations. As a world, we will rarely discover our geniuses unless they share their work with the world.

There is an unfortunate disconnect between artists and techies. The nature of technology exploits a flaw in the human mind – we are divided into analytical folks and emotional folks, and there are few precious minds that can bridge that gap. Things can’t get onto the web without going through a techie. Techies can put things online without artists, but artists can’t put things online without techies. As a result, the web is focused much more on taxonomy and categorizations and text, and lots of things that we’ve had in libraries and newspapers for generations already. The web lacks emotion and art.

How do we bridge this gap? I think the techies can make themselves obsolete. You don’t need a techie to start a wordpress blog, or put a video on YouTube. The mission of techies should not be to put up information, the mission of techies should be to get out of the way of the artists, to give them increasingly powerful platforms (think sketchup) with which to populate the web.

I’ve been doing some reading for a discussion group that I attend in Seattle semi-regularly. They would call what we talk about “transhumanism” or “H+”, I would call it philosophy of technology, particularly with regard to the future.

This week we’re talking about leadership. To what degree do we (Gen Y) have it? To what degree do we need it? How does the increasing pace of technology affect our need for leadership?

I think this topic is particularly interesting in light of the Obama campaign. It was a true grassroots campaign. I would say that it had many distributed leaders, with one person (or maybe a few people) setting the goals and direction. That was without a doubt made possible by technology.

What Obama is doing now – listening – worries me slightly. Don’t we know by now what the problems and concerns of the American public are? I think it’s concerning that the campaign spent two years organizing a distributed leadership and engaged volunteers, and now, rather than switching those people’s goals immediately from electing someone to going out and solving the problems, we are asking them to have fireside chats with their neighbors about healthcare?

I have faith that Obama is a good leader for Generation Y, and I suspect that there may be other motives behind listening. For instance, a majority of the listening he is doing is online. Online communities skew vastly younger and more liberal than the rest of the country. So perhaps he is trying to compile evidence showing that Americans want liberal policies. Perhaps it is a diplomatic nod toward W, to not start picking up his mess before he’s done playing.

I think that the Obama campaign changed our concepts of efficient effective leadership to include Generation Y, and I see potential for the Obama administration to do the same. I hope all that innovation was not engineered to win an election, only to be abandoned when the real fight begins.