Crowdsourcing... Defined.

Hey lovers.

Though I got two very constructive critiques, I didn't find my crowdsourcing to be successful. Although, I did only post to two outlets, but one of which I knew I was going to get some responses from.

Crowd sourcing... what is it?

I imagine it to visually be rainbows flowing into a gold bag. Sorta. Anyways, you get multiple sources and their input, and in most cases in my world, its on a design. Could crowd sourcing be getting sources and their input on say... elections? I suppose it would be, in a way. Elections and underlying points that those running support. Or how about uhhhh getting people's input on your paper?


But to focus on design crowdsourcing. Trish mentioned crowdsourcing of Mac and their Airbook. I haven't seen it, but it made me think that crowdsourcing is really just about everywhere, subtly. For example, Jamie Cullum's new radio station (okay he started broadcasting back in the spring) had asked the audience/subscribers to the email listing to suggest any topics or old artists to feature for the next week.

And then I remember Ponoko sent out a survey with set questions plus room for comments at the end to get suggestions on how to get more people to laser cut from their company. As it turns out, surprise surprise, everyone wanted things cheaper. So for a short period of time, they offered discounts on laser cutting. I filled out that survey so I don't know if it was discounted solely for those who filled it out or not. I told Amy about it and I don't know if she actually got to use the discount... kinda curious now.

Anyways, it's things like that. It's kinda funny that I took a split second to think about it and realized I had already participated. This is all crowdsourcing through social media though. We could say that our critiques in class are crowd sourcing. Just look at Brianna's redesign. She didn't get the amount of responses she wanted, so she took the responses she got from our class critique and incorporated it into her brief. Pretty much the same thing, just different audience.

I also found this book called "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business" by Jeff Howe. (Ok, I'm pretty sure Jan talked about it in class haha)

I did a quick skimming and found one of the things that Jan mentioned in class about open sourcing which ties into this crowd sourcing and how really in any situation, both can easily be tied together. It was about Linux. I think it was Linux, anyway. But yeah, I feel like open sourcing is closely related to crowd sourcing in that you could crowd source to make it open sourced... get everyone's input and then push it back out there for them to use it. Free. Or the other way around- put it out there for free, and then get everyone's input to improve it and push it back out. It's a circl

Interactive crowd sourcing process... not just through social media

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