July 22, 2008

Feel free to submit your Crowdsourcing questions

This afternoon I'm interviewing Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing.* Back in 2006, Jeff coined the phrase of crowdsourcing in his article for Wired magazine. Crowdsourcing, a play on outsourcing, is the idea of using crowds to solve problems, invent and generally, get work done. Think, Wikipedia, Threadless, and iStockPhoto. The crowds are changing business as we know it.

And since I'm interviewing Jeff today, I thought it only right to ask you (the crowd) to submit questions you might have about Crowdsourcing.

If you have any questions, submit your questions by 1:30pm CST and I'll make a point to ask Jeff.

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* On bookshelves everywhere on in late August.

Posted by Kate at July 22, 2008 11:10 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Can you please ask Jeff what are the best ways for organizations to get started with this and companies that are seeing successes from it? - Thanks! Corey

Posted by: corey canfield at July 22, 2008 1:37 PM

New ideas in design are very important - can crowdsourcing help?

Rajiv

Posted by: rajiv at July 23, 2008 12:11 AM

Hi Corey, Good to see your name here. I asked Jeff your question. While he was hesitant to offer a specific equation as he's a journalist and not a consultant...here's what he said. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, "If you want to know everything that's right in crowdsourcing. ask not what the crowd can do for you but what can you do for the crowd. Anyone can offer money to do x. If you're looking for a long-term, sustainable effort, ask what can we create that will really make a lot of people happy -- Think about flickr, youtube, myspace, these are all things that make people happy. Everything else comes after that." He also mentioned in the last chapter of his book, there's a set of rules, if you will, for crowdsourcing.

By the by, you won't hear this response in the podcast as it was part of the follow-up.


Rajiv - have you seen threadless.com? What type of design are you pursuing?

cheers,
kate

Posted by: Kate at July 24, 2008 1:21 PM
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