Posts Tagged ‘crowdsourcing’
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Life In A Day: Preview Screening & Live Q&A
14th June 11
Posted in Film
Author: Alice Bullimore, Integrated Producer, BBH London
What would happen if you asked everyone in the world to take a video of their life on the same day?
Well, it’s happened. The day was July 24th 2010 and people from 120 countries uploaded over 80,000 videos. Life, in a Day.
The raw footage itself is powerful. As Alexandra Coghlan comments in her great review, “what is perhaps most extraordinary and exciting about this project are its leftovers”, and on the ‘explore’ tab at youtube.com/lifeinaday the guys at Google have made all this footage available for us to filter and view, the many stories untold.
But then there’s the film.
Kevin MacDonald & Ridley Scott at RSA undertook the ambitious curatorial job of creating their story of the world, Joe Walker took on the crazily gargantaun mission of editing.
Over 4500 hours of footage reviewed, complied and cut into a coherent 90 minute film.
The film’s not bad either.
It was well received at Sundance, Berlin and SXSW film festivals, Total Film have given it 4 stars and it currently enjoys a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But what was it like laying down this challenge?
What if no-one had entered anything?
What if most of the crowd sourced footage was unusable?
With so much footage to go through, how do you choose what story to tell? An individual’s? The world’s? The editors’? Just whose agenda is at work, and what are the implications of a film like this?
Well, we’re privileged to be able to get a bit closer to some of these answers with a preview screening & live Q&A with the editor, Joe Walker, at BBH in London this wednesday 15th June at 5.00pm.
If you would like to ask Will and the team a question of your own, we have a limited number of tickets available for you & a friend to join us.
Please email carrie.murray@bbh-labs.com to get a free pair of tickets. First come first served.
We look forward to seeing you.
You can also upload questions for Kevin MacDonald and Life in a Day contributors here, by 2pm UK time *today* in advance of the UK premiere. The film is on national release in Vue cinemas on Thursday.
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Lessons We’ve Learned About Engaging Crowds – The Betacup Project
9th June 10
Posted in 20% project, Sustainability, collaboration, crowdsourcing
As many of you know, I’m involved with a mass collaboration effort (more on collaboration vs. crowd sourcing here) to rethink the portable / disposable coffee drinking experience. You see, the vast majority of to-go coffee cups aren’t recyclable, and it turns out we really like our coffee. Tens of billions of energy-inefficient cups end up in landfills every year. This post isn’t about the issue, but if you’re interested, please visit thebetacup.com (there’s still time to vote, rate, and improve upon on the ideas submitted, which is critical to identifying a solution).
This post is about 3 key lessons I’ve learned regarding the engagement of crowds over the course of this process.
1. Money is … well, money.
Money is a wonderful incentive. We heard from a number of people solely motivated by cash. It broadened the audience beyond the group that would have turned up only for the purpose of environmental altruism. However, when money’s at stake, the group is broader, but less collaborative. Some people would accuse others of stealing their ideas; others would respond within minutes to a new idea posted claiming it was too similar to something they’d submitted. I’ve been a part of a number of efforts like this now and money has always been a core incentive. But tying it to a cause illustrated how it can actually work against collaboration on occasion. Specifically, it undermined the bucket brigade reward system we hoped would occur through our community management.
I’m not saying money always has a negative impact, but understanding its limitations is critical in retrospect. It was great for the first part of the process (number of ideas, effort put into submissions, pass-along), but it was potentially detrimental to the second half (refining unpopular but high potential ideas, collaboration across related ideas, gaming of the system).
2. Employ a boring governing body.
Our friend @faris has regularly made the comment that crowds aren’t inherently wise regardless of book titles that have infiltrated innovations culture, which I couldn’t agree with more. In fact, as someone who has tried to wrangle a crowd on multiple occasions, I’ve always assumed there was a dangerous herd mentality I had to police against. In the case of Betacup, I was determined to not let the crowd’s opinion keep me from reading every single submission as a jury member. However, the crowd actually did an incredible job bubbling up the best / freshest / most effective ideas. Startlingly so, in fact. However, the few times I deviated in opinion from the crowd’s most influential members were on ideas that were, well, boring.
Crowds tend to collectively take a “wow me” approach (explains the current state of news media, no?). That works really well at encouraging new types of thought on an ongoing issue like this one, but it actually does some ideas a disservice. Some simple, boring ideas were actually very effective at solving parts of this complex issue (for example, a collection bin shaped like a tube to reduce the probability that other junk or recyclables would be placed in it). Yet these boring ideas were ignored, generating few views, comments, or ratings. My lesson here was of the importance of bringing in a governing group that has a bias of their own, in the other direction. People who value simplicity and boring effectiveness. That combination can yield powerful results to solve problems.
3. Don’t prescribe formats.
We made a bold choice when deciding what form Betacup submissions should take: any. It was why the highly flexible and open Jovoto platform worked beautifully for the type of problem-solving we needed. The coffee cup issue sounds like a design one on the surface: invent a design that’s recyclable but still fits in a cup holder, is cheap, can handle heat, and feels natural on the lips. But it’s actually quite layered. This problem is as much about human behavior and access to manufacturing and disposal resources as it is about engineering. By opening up the submission format, Betacup became accessible to people of all disciplines. When the problem is as ubiquitous yet unknown as disposable cups, it’s critical we have experts from diverse fields weigh in. Without it, we wouldn’t have had any intersectional innovation, and this problem demands it.
What’s impressive about crowds when they’re given opportunities like this is that individuals don’t introduce themselves as engineers, or designers, or marketers. They just solve a problem. And when you look at what they accomplished, you know different disciplines had to be involved, but the lines are too blurry to see where or how.
As I look back on the submission and collaboration process, I think we got a lot of things right, and certainly some things wrong. The lessons above were the most valuable for me as someone interested in such things. They may apply to a very specific collaboration environment: problem solving & innovation (not necessarily design or creative services), but they’ve changed the way I think about crowds. Now I just hope the 300+ ideas change the way we collectively think about our coffee habits.
thebetacup: 60 Seconds To Save The World from the betacup on Vimeo.
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To see, rate and comment on the submissions, visit the contest page. To follow our journey toward a solution, follow @thebetacup.
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The Economies of Small
1st March 10
Posted in business models, culture
'Frenzy' by Amayu, courtesy of Flickr
“The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” Landon Kettlewell, fictional CEO Kodak/Duracell in Cory Doctorow’s “Makers”
I’ve finally finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel “Makers” and – like a lot of people I suspect – needed to take a little break afterward to put my brain back together again. It’s the usual Doctorow high octane cocktail: stuffed full of imaginative near-future action & immutable human frailty, at times the plot veers close to depicting a post-capitalist, economic Armageddon. I’m not going to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it by saying more. Instead, against an ever-increasing backdrop of recent pieces examining crowdsourcing (here are two of our own, here and here), I wanted to dig quickly into a single thought that the book provoked in me within its first few pages.
What if, instead of thinking about sourcing from the crowd, we reverse engineer that thought. In other words, why not send the company out into the crowd?
As Doctorow’s character Kettlewell (more force of nature than human being) puts it:
“Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field …capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our business to start. Our company isn’t a project that pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and the krill will strain through our mighty maw and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company any more: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.”
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Crowdsourcing Clients – Where Agency Nil Went Next
11th August 09
Posted in transformational change
At the end of May this year we got pretty excited and the debate got fairly heated about the launch of Agency Nil – the agency with the convention-busting business model that ‘will work for all it’s worth’. In other words, they’ll do the work and you pay them what you think you should. Unorthodox, audacious stuff whichever way you look at it, we were impressed.
Since launch they’ve been approached by both clients and talent and, inevitably, as they started work on live projects (including clients with food products and online services, not to mention a pitch for a large software company’s NPD launch), one of the toughest questions facing any agency arose: when were they going to find time to do the work brilliantly AND keep scouting for new business? Clearly a conventional solution wasn’t going to cut it at Agency Nil, which is when they came up with this ultra simple, ultra ‘on brand’ idea:
Agency Nil announces their Spotter Program
Catching up again with Agency Nil’s founders, they explained the concept a little more:
“If a person connects Agency Nil with a business that would be interested in our services and they become a client within a year, Agency Nil will give the person who refers them 10% of the first payment they receive (from $100 to $100,000 or more…). This person is called an Agency Nil Spotter. All it takes to become one is an email to Agency Nil introducing the potential client (with the client cc’d, of course). Then the Spotter’s referral is documented. When Agency Nil get paid, the Spotter gets paid. Simple.”
We love the idea of an agency experimenting with new business in this way. A smart move that painlessly exploits an era where networking and sharing useful information has never been easier. What’s more, it’s in keeping with the spirit of their launch which, as they put it at the time: “It’s a win/win. And that’s the kind of business we like to be in.” Agency Nil also draw attention to the fact they’re putting into practice a simple way for talented individuals to profit from their connections: “Isn’t it about time people started to get rewarded for the networks they’ve built?”
Of course this isn’t the first time an agency has used crowd sourcing to find prospective marketing clients. Who knows, will people really refer a hot prospect? How reliable will the connections be? Will it tend to be for small projects only, or will Agency Nil land a multi-million dollar account this way? They may hit some bumps in the road along the way, but to us this approach looks like a natural next step for them and a dead simple, innovative solution to an age old problem. So again, we say hats off to Agency Nil and good luck.
If you want to sign-up as an Agency Nil Spotter, send an email to Spotter@AgencyNil.com.
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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.
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“Data tells stories about our lives”
11th May 09
Posted in creativity, data, design
- Mind blowing: Flight patterns by Aaron Koblin http://www.aaronkoblin.com/
If data visualisation is the new rock and roll, Elvis has (just) left the building. Aaron Koblin played to an enthralled audience of BBH-ers this afternoon, blew our minds and incredibly kindly agreed to be interviewed by Labs afterwards.Our interview to follow soon, but to whet your appetite, a quick download of our (and your) key questions for the rock star of the data visualisation world.
Balancing immediacy and intrigue: A frequent criticism of data visualisation is that while often extremely beautiful, sometimes it doesn’t make the information contained any clearer-it can sometimes even seem to obfuscate in the name of art. Should great data visualisation simplify or should it embrace complexity and reward exploration? Should it be reductive or expansive in intent?Where left brain meets right brain: When embarking on a project, which comes first, the data or the technique? How critical a role does software play? Do the themes and memes recurring in data visualisation reflect the artists’ preoccupations or the data sets available?Proliferation versus privacy: One of the key enablers of data visualisation is the phenomenal explosion in the amounts of data we now generate everywhere we go. We live in a golden age of open-ness around personal data but will we reach a tipping point where we reclaim our personal privacies? Or will we opt in to share anonymised data for the common good?The power of synesthesia: Some of the most compelling data visualisation projects are those which express one medium-almost one sense- by means of another. Visually representing dance or music, aurally representing data sets-what is it we find so compelling about this “synesthetic” effect?Crowd-sourcing versus the wisdom of the crowd: Koblin’s recent work experiments with crowd-sourcing but suggests an ambivalence about the process. While a central theme of data visualisation is the wisdom of the crowd, how does it skew the data if the crowd knows it’s being watched? Is the unconscious wisdom of the crowd purer and more compelling or is conscious collaboration of the masses the future? How important is the role of the curator in that process?
Answers – or at least compelling and considered answers – on a blogpost near you shortly….
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Designer needed. Logo desired. Labs flirts with the crowd.
3rd April 09
Posted in BBH Labs
Tasked with exploring new models for marketers, one of our first orders of business will be to hold an “open pitch” for our new logo. All interested designers please visit http://bit.ly/39yWEd for more on the deadline, the brief and the fee.
We’re posting a brief on Crowdspring well aware of the heated discussions taking place within the design community regarding sites that promote spec work. Though the crowdsourcing business model is still clearly in its infancy, BBH Labs reasoning for giving Crowdspring a try, simply put, is because the model seems to be working (albeit, better for smaller companies).
We’ve heard the arguments against Crowdspring. We’ve heard it said that it lowers the standard of what is considered “good” design. But for the purposes of this conversation, isn’t a “good” design one that pleases the person paying for it? I think Marley and Me is a “bad” film. My niece disagrees. So be it.
Another argument is that the Crowdspring model is akin to outsourcing, putting professional design work in the hands of untrained amateurs, and in the process, driving down the price real designers are able to charge for their services. If you’re a great designer, these sites shouldn’t be a threat since aspiring designers willing to work on spec is nothing new. If you’re a mediocre designer on the other hand, then consider that new technologies will only continue to make you better: just as the mouse made you better and Adobe Illustrator made you better, competing on a larger playing field should also make you better (and add to your bottom line).
I don’t want to sound overly insensitive, but evolution isn’t always orderly: we are living in a transformational period and in order to not be put out to pasture prematurely, entire industries are having to retrain themselves and rethink how business is going to be conducted going forward. From young designers to established agency networks, change is coming.
I’ll stop rambling now and come back to why we like Crowdspring. We see these sites as giving much more than they take. By matchmaking small businesses that wouldn’t have been able to otherwise afford a custom logo with a pool of designers that wouldn’t have otherwise been able to offer their services, they are helping to grow an overall appreciation for design as well as build an entirely new market that didn’t previously exist.
Will Crowdspring deliver Labs a great logo that meets our demanding and sophisticated needs? Not sure, but we’re looking forward to fishing these new waters nonetheless.
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