What Do Crowds Get From Crowdsourcing?

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Sunday, 12 April 2009

When I responded to a blogpost on www.buzzmachine.com, I didnt expect to be quoted in What Would Google Do. But WWGD’s author, Jeff Jarvis followed some lessons from his book and found a simple way to collaborate with his readers and turn them into co-authors.

- How did he know that people would help him?

- How did he do it?

Among other things, he is a community organizer. But we’ll get back to that later. 

First, lets go back to some recent politics. During the Republican Convention in the US in 2008, then candidate Obama, was mocked for his experience as a community organizer. How would this prepare him to be commander in chief? Community organizers dont have any real responsibility, do they? Which led many to ask – what exactly do community organizers do, anyway?

We thought this was an interesting question (since people were also wondering how a community organizer had come this far anyway). Community organizers have no formal authority or leadership role in a corporate sense and yet they cause action and ultimately change. How do they do it? We thought there was a lot to learn from a role that can get results without much formal power.

So over the last few months, we have talked with people responsible for organizing online communities – creating them, growing, nurturing them and ultimately achieving shared goal/s. One of the questions we asked was:

What motivates people in these communities? 

As Jake McKee put it,  in a successful community, the ideal is that:

Everyone goes home happy. The organization gets what they want and the community gets what they want.

But its really easy for this to tend to exploitation if you dont understand why people are part of the community in the first place. And this in turn, is a quick way to fail. 

So how do community organizers get their communities motivated online? This is what we have learned so far. 

Pay Them

Some examples include: Muji Award, Cisco I-Prize, X-Prize, Innocentive (P&G, Eli Lilly), TopCoder. Variations include Threadless, CafePress, iStockphoto, where the market decides compensation. And then arrangements like Mechanical Turk, reward anyone for achieving specific, generally non-specialized tasks. 

Innocentive may run some of the best known bounty-style crowdsourcing operations. And so we wanted to understand from them, what was motivating their “solvers” – those who work on the various problems appearing on the Innocentive site. Fortunately Harvard Business School’s Karim Lakhani has the same idea and had laready asked solvers what motivated them. 

There is more to this, since there are some unique aspects to Innocentive’s crowdsourcing initiatives in terms of who owns the end product and how people work together.

So then this looks like a traditional outsourcing approach that has found a more efficient way to get to more smart individuals, more quickly. This is evolving, as Innocentive celebrates the successful solvers (and they can take credit for the solutions they devise) and Innocentive is exploring ways to facilitate coordination between solvers.  

Money is interesting, but for community organizers its the other motivations that seem even more useful.

Make Meaning

I first heard the term “making meaning” from a Guy Kawasaki presentiation.  And this ties back to the findings at innocentive about working on meaningful projects. Guy talks about 3 ways to make meaning: 

 - increase the quality of life

 - right a wrong

 - prevent the end of something good

Open source software seems to hit all of these in some way for example, Linux, Firefox, Wordpress. Most people working ont these project believe they are making something better than might be available through any other process (I wont get into the good vs evil of open vs closed software). Projects like Wikipedia, SETI@home- these represent the “classic” crowdsourcing examples, most likely because they enable participants to make meaning.

Here are a few more lesser-known corwdsourcing examples, because they appeal to more specialized communities - BigSoccer grew, in-part around groups who were organizing to bring soccer teams to specific US citites. We have talked about Mangahelpers (right a wrong – let people see Manga in aany language); Newstrust (right a wrong or increase quality of life by exposing bias in news);  Tweenbots (prevent the end of something good – help helpless robots get around NYC, really) Lots more examples meet this description on a crowdsourced list of crowdsorucing examples. 

As a side note: we dont think its a coincidence that this is what motivates people to form or join start-ups. Its powerful stuff. I look at heavy contributors to communities in the same way I see people in early stage companies – they know the pay-off might be deferred or that their might be none at all, but they are early investors. 

Reinforce Meaning

In a recent online seminar as part of the MarketingProfs Virtual Conference, Barack Obama’s campaign strategist, David Plouffe, gave a glimpse into one of the most successful political campaigns in modern history. What was most interesting to me, was what surprised the Obama team. One of the things, was how actively people sought out information to help them talk more effectively on their candidates behalf. 

As the campaign evolved, new issues emerged and people wanted to understand how they could respond on behalf of the campaign. And the campaign constantly reminded people about why they were doing what they were doing and obliged with supporting data and talking points. Its easy to forget, but its not enough to make meaning, people need to be reminded about what is at stake and why they are doing what they do. 

Recognize People

Youtube captures this idea nicely – upload your video and if its good, you can be famous. These tend to be people who are looking for recognition from a broad audience. The same is true in different, smaller, more specialized communities. Whether its awards, ranked lists or votes. Its doesnt matter if its a game or real life (wealthiest, sexiets, brainiest, funniest or best use of sheep in animation), people want to be recognized. 

Wordpress is interesting in this regard. Its not so much that there are points, but every aspect of the project includes long lists of contributors – as Raanan Bar Cohen points out, just take a look at the number of names on the about page - http://wordpress.org/about/- there does appear to be a hierarchy, but there is broad recognition. But Wordpress also uses metrics to compare, rank and rate contributions from its community, which brings us to our next section. 

Keeping Score 

It seems like rankings and scores are the currency of many communities. Its simply the way peers are able to tell who is the best – most read, most viewed, most published, most sales, etc. And it seems like almost anything that can be measured or judged will qualify for scoring. The main differences tend to be around who is judging or if in fact judging is required because “more impartial” measurements can be taken.

Continuing with the Wordpress example, Wordpress provides statistics around most of its contributions which include everything from ideas, to designs and code. These include “votes” such as number of downloads and ratings. It looks a lot like Youtube, only there the currency is views and ratings and comments. 

Fluther, makes use of a points system which combines a variety of scoring schemes. For example, users can score other users contributions such as +5 points for a qood answer to a question. Or the Fluther operators, give +2 points if you show up at the site 2 days in a row. Not surprisingly some of the highest scoring Flutherers are some of the most influential and important community participants. Some have gone on to become employees, while others receive more administrative rights to help guard against abuse.  

On BigSoccer, “rank” is conveyed a little differently in the form of seniority  (based on join date) or level of participation such as total posts and blog entries. In short, participation is the main explicit metric. Shortyawards combined this idea on a few levels. Individuals recoginized others by nominting them.

@shortyawards I nominate @twitterperson for a Shorty Award in #whatever [reason]

Nominations were then summed to produce ranked lists of people and ultimately these ranked lists resulted in awards. Simple voting took place on Twitter over a 2 week period and resulted in the first comprehensive directory of leading people in a variety of Twitter categories.  What was most interesting about this, was how quickly it grew. From just a few people nominating friends, tens of thousands of people were participating in 2 weeks.  

Comments. Feedback. Ideas. Opinions. Answers. 

I dont know why people feel compelled to shout answers at TV gameshow hosts. Ben Finkel of Fluther describes how people just like to share what they know. If you ask a question there is some inate desire to share what you know. On Fluther, this is what people do and in fact it has played out in a variety of formats from LinkedIn Answers to Yahoo Answers. 

On Wordpress.com the community supports itself in this way. Have a question? Chances are that the person who responds to you is just another user, helping out and telling you what they know. In a broader sense, blogs are not that different and nor are reviews. In many cases, I am simply showing off what I know. 

What do all these things have in common online? They tend to be on the record – that is, these answers, posts, opinions are findable by others and therefore can serve as evidence of your knowledge and opinions. 

Close the Loop

All this feedback doesnt mean anything, if people dont believe it is making a difference. Some communities have a policy of showing you have they are responding. Fluther does this rather nicely via constant updates about your questions and answers. Its harder when people are submitted ideas. But here is something interesting – when Google released latitude, they credited the person who initially suggested the idea and featured Lana from New York on their blog. Its one thing to recognize major time invested, but why not great feedback and ideas?

Dont Make it Work

Sometime back I talked with Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. Roelof has helped to grow a number of well known companies over the last 10 or so years, beginning with Paypal and then more recently, Youtube. He desribed some of the core ideas and realizations that enabled the growth of both of these companies. They made is really easy for their customers or users to help them by taking small actions – for example, using Paypal to send or request money from almost anyone, even if that other person didnt have an account. Or sharing a Youtube video via e-mail. Today its not unual to see multiple sharing options for almost everything online, but Youtube made this easy to understand and do. The result was staggering – most of Youtube’s traffic came via links shared via e-mail, largely because they made it so easy to do . 

Work Where People Already Are

One of our favorite examples of this, is 37signals Basecamp. They make it really easy to form groups across organizations. Getting started is simple for everyone, so inviting people to join your project or set up you own is not just easy for the person sending the invitation – its also low risk because you know people will find it easy to join it. A while back Jason Fried, confirmed that 37Signals does no advertising. One of the reasons, is they have made it really, really easy to recommend them and for those who receive the recommendation to start participating, ASAP. 

Over the years, we have invited people to use all sorts of Intranet-project-management-thingies. Basecamp has been the first real success, in part because the good people at 37Signals have made it really easy to pull together a group of people, but also because they make it really easy to work with e-mail. So most people need never log into Basecamp, they can participate, just by doing what they have been doing – reading and responding to e-mails. 

Shorty Awards built one of the best directories for Twitter almost overnight (2 weeks) by enabling simple contributions via Twitter. No need to click, or leave what you were doing – just observe a simple format and you can quickly contribute. In the offline world, we noticed this recently with a few different products, beginning with an HP printer cartridge, which included reusable shipping packaging and an return shipping label. Need to dig into this a little more, but it just seems to be a hallmark of good design – in this particular instance, it designing to make it easier for people to act in a way that helps you and your organization. 

Play With a Purpose

GWAP captures this idea perfectly. As you play the games, the games generate useful output, too. Making a contribution need not feel like work. In fact, there is no reason why this cant be fun, too. Perhaps the least amount of work, is not even knowing that you are working, because you thought you were doing something else. 

Which brings us back to Jeff and WWGD. For most of the folks commenting on his Buzzmachine posts, this is whats going on. Its serious, but playful. It doesnt feel like work. Its simply dialog. For me personally, it was just fun to see and respond to ideas – playing with ideas is fun for me. 

There are probably a few posts worth of gaming-related ideas from some of the more successful online game franchises. Certainly communities around World of Warcraft are interacting at multiple levels – on the one hand they are playing a game which constantly tracks their progress and publishes it for others to see and elaborate groups come together to learn and go to battle together, but they also share feedback with the game developers to help improve the game they are playing. 

Invert the Commons

In the Innocentive example, we talked about the ownership of the output. In many cases, the ownership of the product created by the community is very important. In the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond, talks about the Inverse Commons.  Its a fantstic idea that challenges some conventional ideas of property ownership because it challenges some long-held assumptions – namely, what happens if things get better if you use them more, instead of getting worse? 

Well, the Internet is probably a good example – pieces are owned but its not owned by anyone and it seems to improve. This is in part what drives debates on Net Neutrality. But at every level the Internet seems to benefit from ongoing use. This is a little to general, so lets pick some more specific examples.

Developers at Wordpress.com (run by for-profit Automatic) actually do work which they give to the Wordpress community for free (actually they estimated about half their effort is of this type). Why? Well, Wordpress software improves because of the way it is owned – everyone contributes to make it better (give ideas, write code, add designs, etc.) and the result is that everyone gets a product that they could never create alone or probably in a private organization. Automatic doesnt need to sell the software, it sells services related to the software such as hosting and various consultants, designers and developers get paid to build on top of this platform.

Other organizations play off this principal too. Threadless get better because it has more, better choice when it asks people to contribute and share in the selection of the best designs and profit from their sale. Lego’s creation of the Lego Factory lets people create their own lego sets and in return, Lego is constantly receiving feedback about interesting ideas and things that people might enjoy building. The found a way to benefit from playtime that might have happened independently and not as part of “the commons”.  Nike did somethiing similar with running, when they encourage people to share their runs – the more people use this service, the more they can learn about new runs, receive challenges and encouragement. 

At a simpler level, as more people choose to take simple actions like leaving feedback on Yelp, Amazon, Walmart, etc, the more the shopping experience improves because higher quality information about products is fed back to the market. Or quite simply, information quality gets better. In fact, in most situations where people can get you feedback about your product or service, you want more people using your stuff, because this enables you learn more quickly what works and what does not. Whenever I talk about this, I like to use the example of Google Adwords or landing page optimization – more usage is better. 

Dont forget the By-Products

Creating a hyperlink started out as a useful way to organize information on the web. People happily created content and linked to other sites relevant to what they were doing. What Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized was that Google would be very different search engine because it found value in these links – they viewed these links as votes. They took an action that people were going to do anyway and turned it into the heart of one of the most successful organizations in history. They use clicks and sales data in a similar way to vote on the best ads that they serve. 

Its hard to overstate the value of the by products:

- amazon uses browsing and purchase data to make better purchase recommendations

- flickr finds interesting photos based on comments, views and interactions around photos posted to their site

- sense networks (with whom we work) is harvesting location data as a vote for a variety of applications from restaurant recommendations to epidemic detection

- meraki is building networks by recognizing that people are going to set up WiFi hotspots for themselves and might be willing to share them with others under the right security and economic conditions

For the most part these examples have to do with “data shadows” – the various data collected as we go about our digital lives. But once you start to think about actions that people take everyday, that might be able to be reused in some way, you likely have the ultimate “community resources”. 

So in the spirit of this post, if you have come this far, please let me know what you think. I’m planning to update this a few times in response to feedback. 

Special Thanks

To the various people who have agreed to speak with me over the last few months. 

Gregory Galant – Sawhorse Media (creators of www.shortyawards.com)

Dwayne Spradlin & Lisa Reinhold – Innocentive www.innocentive.com

Raanan Bar Cohen – Automattic (the company behind www.wordpress.com, among other things)

Jake McKee – Community Guy www.communityguy.com (among other things, former community leader in Lego’s online community)

Jesse Hertzberg – Big Soccer www.bigsoccer.com

Ben Finkel – Fluther www.fluther.com

Posted in: Crowdsourcing | Tagged: bigsoccer, community guy, community manager, community organizer, Crowdsourcing, fluther, innocentive, shortyawards, wordpress, wwgd | 3 Comments