Archive for the ‘crowdsourcing’ Category
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Isn’t Crowdsourcing Just Good Marketing? Interview with Rick Liebling
22nd February 10
Posted in crowdsourcing
“The world is becoming too fast, too complex and too networked for any company to have all the answers inside.” Yochai Benkler, Yale University, from The Wealth of Networks
Lightbulbs image by Goldberg, via Flickr
Our collective interest in crowdsourcing (the creative and commercial opportunities and challenges it throws up) seems to be on an exponential curve only matched by the controversy and misunderstanding still surrounding the topic. Cue Rick Liebling’s eBook, Everyone is Illuminated, out today, a compendium of constructive thinking on the topic to date. As experiments in crowdsourcing start to unfold and the world waits to see just how sustainable it is a marketing tool, his primer aims to shed light on the whole area by gathering (in part crowdsourced, of course) insight and hands-on experience of crowd sourcing together in one handy place. We were happy to make a contribution to the eBook and caught up with Rick to tell us more about the project. Check out his introductory post here too.
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Where does the agency end, and the crowd begin?
3rd February 10
Posted in business models, crowdsourcing
Photo: Dunechaser, Flickr, http://j.mp/c6kd2o
I went to the ‘Crowdsourcery Potions 101′ event at JWT yesterday as part of Social Media Week in NYC. Not so sure about the event name, but the content was great, and the panel line up was genuinely stellar.
We watched John Winsor (Victors & Spoils Founder) lead a discussion that featured Ty Montague (Co-President & CCO, JWT North America), Saneel Radia (Alchemist / Chief Potion Master, Denuo), Michael Lebowitz (Founder & CEO, Big Spaceship) and the inimitable Faris Yakob (Chief Technology Dude, McCann NY).
Thanks to the appliance of science, the whole thing is viewable at the bottom of this post, on video. Lots of useful, practical discussion around the kind of cultures, systems, and processes that would enable new forms of creative collaboration. I particularly liked the metaphor of ’scaffolding’: the structures that are required for successful collaboration efforts (the filters, the creative direction, the incentive model, the access requirements, and so on).
Anyway, I was struck by one area of the debate in particular, and I’ve been reflecting on that since. There were a number of observations about how business models (around agencies, and how they construct themselves, most specifically) were being challenged, and indeed how the definition of what constituted ‘the agency’ was evolving rapidly in new and interesting ways.
As Ty Montague suggested, ‘we’re on the verge of a remaking of business and what a company is’. Bold and exciting words from the leader of one of the largest and most powerful agencies around. In particular, Ty was talking about a point John Winsor had made just a moment before, around the idea that the distinction between JWT and *beyond JWT* was blurring, and would continue to blur. As creative businesses continue to experiment with new models of creative collaboration, and explore different approaches to maintaining a creative arsenal comprising the highest quality individuals and partners, it is inevitable that which was once almost wholly contained within an agency will become, to some extent, located outside the formal confines of that business.
Creative agencies need to move towards becoming permeable organizations. Those in networks need to be reconfigured as networked organizations versus simply organizations within networks. Creative business must be able to draw on not just the talent within the building, but the many skills and areas of expertise that lie beyond those walls. And they need to be able to draw on this external resource. Like immediately. Certainly within BBH Labs we believe this is the *only* way the future can look; and of course it comes with challenges.
For us (probably like many, I’m in no way suggesting we’re unique here), this means building and curating a broader group of people and companies with whom we create and produce ideas, and of course, we’re busy doing just that. It was an ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems who once said, ‘no matter where you work, most of the smart people work somewhere else’. Whilst challenging to orthodoxy, there’s definitely something in that.
Back to Crowdsourcery Potions . . . Ty was hinting that one logical manifestation of this philosophy would be the formation of a broader pool of potential creative collaborators, perhaps more akin to the curated creative group put together by the team at Victors & Spoils. I also sometimes think the Alessi example is helpful here. Alessi occasionally put together hand-picked ‘crowds’ outside their company to help them on specific projects. So for example, on their program to create new ‘postmodern’ style product designs, they curated an invite-only ‘crowd of around 200 postmodern architects to submit work. This seems smart. It also signals a potential way forward for agencies looking to innovate new modes of creative collaboration.
But it also raises what for me is *the big question*. In fact, two related sets of questions.
1. CULTURE: If the culture of an organization is one of the key elements of differentiation between one agency and another, when does the definition of an agency blur to the point of intangibility? When does JWT (or BBH, or Victors & Spoils, or IDEO for that matter) cease to be JWT? When does JWT become Victors & Spoils? When does it simply become a set of senior and experienced curators of skills, talent and partnerships? And does this matter, if it does happen?
2. INCENTIVES: What kinds of models are right for incentivizing the crowd? If the model of the future is going to involve fluid boundaries between ‘working for’ and ‘working with’, what does that mean for how people are incentivized? Not just in the crowd outside the agency, but within the crowd inside the agency? And linked to the first point, what value does one place on the cultural DNA found within agencies (which surely *must* have a commercial value) versus the more flexible and emerging skills found outside?
Early days, but exciting days.
All ideas, challenges, thoughts or builds welcome.
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Notes
For more coverage of the debate check out Jonny Makkar’s (@jsmakr) neat summary blog post here, Faris’s here, or John Winsor’s short but kinda sweet piece here.
For more on the critically important role of culture, see Grant McCracken’s excellent and provocative new book: “Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living breathing corporation“.
Watch live streaming video from smw_newyork at livestream.com -
Interview with the3six5 project founders: 365 days, 365 perspectives
26th January 10
Posted in crowdsourcing
“New tools give life to new forms of action…eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination… We are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups.” Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 2008
One of the things that caught our eye last year was a blogpost from Len Kendall sharing the plan for a simple, yet audacious lifestreaming project. Every day for 365 days, Len and co-founder Daniel Honigman were going to get a different person to write about their experience that day. If you will, a crowdsourced diary for 2010: the3six5 Project.
Just under a month in and c.250,000 site views later, the project is growing into something with real currency AND potentially long lasting value. Before we get into the interview with Len and Daniel, here are a few early thoughts on why we think the project is turning out to be so interesting. As always, we’d love to hear other points of view, so please let us know what you think.
1. Currency: the3six5 mashes up three communication themes - crowdsourcing, curation and lifestreaming - neatly in one idea. (At the same time it’s a simple journal. The combination is very seductive: it feels experimental and familiar at the same time).
2. Cultural value: if the entries continue in the vein set down so far, it’s a time capsule of intensely individual thoughts. One year seen through 365 different minds, gathered in one place.
3. As communication models go, a continuous, virtuous circle. Fresh, surprising content, which in turn its originators & their supporters want to promote and propagate.
4. Great content: none of the above would mean anything if the words didn’t leap off the page. And boy, do they. A lot of writers have taken Daniel & Len at their word and taken risks, others have brilliantly evoked the day and their state of mind, often to profound effect.
5. Success or failure depends on the community: The project has the chance to go wrong at any point, all it takes is a missed post. If we’re honest, that adds to the frisson around the project. It also proves yet again that crowdsourcing is no cop-out for the curators. As wonderful as everyone is, we suspect it can still feel like herding cats at times. As one of the contributors so far, I can also testify to a what-if-you-fail-to-come-up-with-anything? feeling in your gut as you sit down at the end of the day to write a post to an immovable deadline.
We caught up with Daniel and Len, to hear how it’s going so far from their perspective, as well as their hopes and expectations for the rest of the year.
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Crowdsourcing a Holiday Playlist: Taped Together
24th December 09
Posted in crowdsourcing, music
Taped Together entry for December 17
2009 undoubtedly has been the year when the ‘crowd’ really came into its own. As the year drew to a close, it seemed like it might be a fun (okay, also possibly foolish) idea to attempt to create the world’s first crowd-curated holiday playlist.
Whilst I’d tinkered with this in fairly samizdat fashion at the end of November, the idea properly came to life when Maria Popova (@brainpicker) - the undisputed queen of online cultural curation and author of, amongst other things, Brain Pickings - got in touch. She suggested we create an audio tumblr together and see if we could find 31 people to curate one, great, vaguely seasonal track for every day in December.
So far, 24 days and around a 1000 plays later, it’s a fairly diverse collection of music and commentary: by turns happy, nostalgic, darkly funny, triumphant, moving, warm, sad and - if you ask us - all of it pretty downright wonderful.
We hope people have had as much fun as we have getting involved and watching it unfold. Maria and I will say thank you properly to everyone when the project completes at the end of the month, but in the meantime please keep checking out the site, listen to the smorgasbord of tracks we’ve had in so far and read what the curators have had to say about the music they’ve chosen.
For more about Taped Together, check it out here.
The full and final playlist will be made available as a download to anyone who’d like one, please check out the site for details at the end of this month.
Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone.
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GOOD Magazine crowdsources world-changing ideas
13th August 09
Posted in creativity, crowdsourcing, culture
We like this, and look forward to seeing what comes from it.
GOOD Magazine are asking people: “If you were to invent anything to push the world forward, what would it be?”
The jury’s still out on whether collaborative creativity can provide a viable business model (high enough quality; low enough costs) for creative businesses, but this seems to us to be a smart way of focusing the minds of artists, inventors and other thinkers on some of the more important questions.
We’ll watch with interest - what would your idea be?
(Thanks to John Winsor of CP&B - @jtwinsor - for the heads-up).
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(Un)classes - community powered learning
10th August 09
Posted in crowdsourcing, culture
We just stumbled across (Un)classes (thanks to Julius Solaris | @tojulius).
A potentially strong application of collaborative intelligence . . . with a twist.
(Un)classes starts with the premise that everyone has something to teach, and much to learn. But, pragmatically, few of us are going to sign into formal programs. Casual learning (as they frame this form of education) is aimed squarely at people who lead hectic lives but still want to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.
(Un)classes is thus in effect a marketplace for matching interests with passion, simply connecting people who’d otherwise have few ways of directly collaborating in this way. It’s deliberately informal, with few rules and none of the stuffiness that could surround what is in effect a ‘learning’ service.
(We’re also reminded of the campaign BBH New York helped create for one of BBH’s clients, NYC & Co, around using one’s skills, passions, and willingness to help address some of NYC’s most important issues: What’s Your Blank?)
The depth of the (Un)classes offering seems quite shallow at the moment, but as people sign up, and choice and quality deepen, it will be interesting to see whether the idea takes off. We wish them luck.
More details at: http://www.unclasses.org/about
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“Big is easy, small is hard”: Print is Mobile
3rd August 09
Posted in crowdsourcing, design, mobile
Author: Adam Glickman
Following our piece looking at journalism (a review of the transformational change at the Telegraph Media Group) and fiction (interview with Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin), our interest in the profound changes occurring in the publishing industry continues with this look at the opportunities in mobile.
We often talk about the future of mobile media and what it will all look like, but what about the future of the mobile media of the past? The notion of carrying around your reading as reams of inked paper might disappear, but the written word certainly won’t. So it seems a very natural progression for print publishers to move from paper to digital by simply reformatting for small screen mobile devices. But the considerations are vast. And more importantly, how much do people really want to use their phones as reading devices anyway?
We recently met a company called ScrollMotion, a New York-based iPhone app developer that is hard at work answering these questions. The company have been steadily creating a suite of new tools for traditional print media companies to better engage their readers via apps on mobile phones, and in the process, quietly making publishing deals with a wide range of top-notch publishers. Their growing client list is impressive and includes Conde Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., Tribune Company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Wiley.
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“Sharing is the essence of creation”
24th June 09
Posted in crowdsourcing, culture, transformational change
Wow, are we looking forward to seeing this film in full.
“RiP: A Remix Manifesto” - a film about remix and copyright culture. It explores copyright issues in the information age, where the media landscape is being profoundly transformed, and the distinction between producers and consumers is becoming blurred, to say the least.
This is the trailer and it’s uplifting, provocative, challenging and inspiring, all at the same time. Full of complex debates and clearly coming with a strong point of view on how those debates might be - must be - resolved (so not everyone will agree with this, by any means, but heh, that’s good right?).
Features contributions from Gilberto Gil, Laurence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and many more. We’re particularly looking forward to seeing the awesome Lessig in action again: “There is no way to kill this technology, we can only criminalize its use” - Laurence Lessig.
Download the film in full, paying what you think it’s worth: http://www.ripremix.com/
Check their blog: http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/rip-a-remix-manifesto/
Follow them on Twitter: http://twitter.com/remixmanifesto
(Thanks to Marc Schiller - @marcdschiller - for the heads up)
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Bring the noise: making music with the masses
17th June 09
Posted in creativity, crowdsourcing, music
We have been playing with this really impressive collaborative & spoken word tool, Bb 2.0, and melting our brains thinking about the possibilities, and where this could go next
Conceived by Darren Solomon, from Science for Girls, but with plenty of help from users, the tool is based around the insight that it’s possibly to play multiple videos on YouTube simultaneously. It’s similar to, but according to Darren pre-dates, the Kutiman YouTube mash-up videos (which are also awesome pieces of remixed art).
Darren & team go into the why and how in more detail in their FAQ, which are worth checking out. It’s an interesting experiment around using the crowd to conceive of and produce music, but one critical element stands out for us - the role of Darren as both editor (he filters and selects all the music chosen) and overall creative director (his vision, his direction, his imagination). In debates around the use of the crowd - in this case the musical talents of the crowd - the pivotal role of the editorial director is frequently overlooked. In a crowdsourced world the role of the ‘creative’ is more important than ever.
Thanks to @aaronkoblin for the tip off; his own version (kind of) of this is of course his pretty brilliant ‘Bicycle built for two thousand’ project.
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“I’ve always been interested in microscopes”: an interview with Aaron Koblin
12th May 09
Posted in creativity, crowdsourcing, data
"House of Cards" promo www.aaronkoblin.com
As you may just have heard (we’ve been a tad over-excited…) data visualisation maestro Aaron Koblin came into to talk to us yesterday. He kicked off with a showcase of his work, from his exquisite grad school visualisations of flight paths (see post below) to his latest embryonic projects for Google labs. Along the way he showcased extraordinary visualisations of the ebb and flow of information in cities and around the globe, experiments in crowdsourced sound design and perhaps his most famous project, the Radiohead “House of Cards” promo.
Visualisation of SMS messages in Amsterdam www.aaronkoblin.com
In showcasing his extraordinary portfolio he touched on a number of powerful and provocative themes which we followed up on in our interview. Themes around the power of social context to make data compelling, the power of data visualisation to embrace the complexity of our lives today and the tension between the human and the machine present in crowd-sourcing engines. He also shared his key learnings from life at the front line of data visualisation:
Looking at everyday things in new ways completely changes your perspective: there is no ”mundane” data when you set it in context.
Use multiple visualisation techniques: there’s more than one way of seeing things
Stay true to the data, not the “real world” : There is a random-ness to data-it will make patterns you never anticipated. Respect the random-ness.
You don’t have to use all the data : sometimes seeing patterns is about what you leave out
Set the data free: open-source and let other people play with your data
Following his talk, very graciously agreed to be interviewed by Labs about our (and your) burning questions around data visualisation. It was a fascinating conversation for us and we hope for you. So over to Aaron….and many thanks to those who submitted questions for him.
Why do you think the world has suddenly gone crazy for data visualisation? 18 months ago it was a struggle to get anyone interested in data and now it’s the new rock and roll…
I guess it’s really the times that we live in, now you have tools like Twitter and Facebook and things that are widely used not just by the nerds but by everybody. Popular culture has also just all of a sudden embraced the power of storytelling through data and the relevance of all the data to their lives. All kinds of things have happened that simply weren’t possible before - the author you look up to, the musician, etc. they’re sharing all kinds of things - you can be intimately living their lives along with them and you see all different types of applications.
Do you think it’s partly about the explosion in the amount of data currently available, the data trail we leave behind us now or the fact that companies have more data than they can process so they end up giving it away?
I think ultimately the biggest change is that the data is now relevant to people’s lives. Before most of the data was about infrastructure at best and a lot of it was locked away or presented in aggregate form. When you’re presented with a huge lump sum number that has no context it’s just not interesting, but now when you get these granular stories, things that are saying at this specific point in time here’s the way that things changed, just by giving it that context and social relevance it becomes interesting.
Ben Malbon
Mel Exon
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