Fresh off of last night's NetSquared MeetUp featuring Marty Kearns of Green Media Toolshed, I totally just crowdsourced!
Marty spoke briefly (and compellingly) about crowdsourcing tasks to help the general environmental movement, as well as crowdsourcing in the general progressive world. Crowdsourcing is an idea where an organization can use the wisdom of crowds to accomplish small tasks within a larger goal.
In my case, the goal wasn't very high and lofty, but it was something that was proving to be out of my reach. For those who don't know, I maintain a shareware program called Pukka and occasionally it gets written up here or there by a blogger. Frequently, the posts are in a foreign language, so I make regular use of Babel Fish to translate them. Today, I noticed a post written in Swedish, however Babel Fish does not provide a Swedish translation service. I figured it would be an easy task to Google up a service that did, but it actually proved quite difficult and I came up blank -- most people wanted to sell me either translation products or translation services.
With a suggestion from Echo-alum Emily, I turned to Yahoo! Answers. I asked my question and within several minutes I had a great answer among several. Read the Swedish post, my question, and the service I ended up using.
While admittedly a relatively meager use of crowdsourcing, it really drove home the points from last night. The challenge is for organizations to stop thinking about members as merely donations or emails on a list and more about how to harness their power and collective wisdom to move the organization's goals forward. For example, GMT is creating useful media tools, such as how to get such-and-such reporter to write a story about your campaign or what the most effective email address to contact a certain press outlet is. Volunteers, often anonymous, will come to the site, participate for a short while, and may be never heard from again. Cross-verification between volunteers can weed out the bad results and the net result is that larger benefits can be constructed out of the work of the collective.
For my experiment, the aggregate time spent asking the question, getting answers, and translating the article was probably less than the time it took to write this blog post. But the potential is there for organizations to put to work millions of volunteers on the internet. As Marty said, what would you do with 10,000 people for ten minutes? Or as I like to say, a million monkeys banging randomly on a million keyboards for a million years will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare -- isn't it time you harnessed that power?
