[ad_1]
If two heads are better than one, it follows that millions are better than two. That’s the theory behind crowdsourcing, anyway, which looks to the masses to solve mysteries, predict the weather, and save lost languages.
The concept had a major victory this week when the players of online game Foldit advanced HIV and AIDS research. The game is designed to help scientists while also serving as a competitive puzzle. Foldit relies on humans’ superior ability to pattern match, which can result in solving problems that would take infinitely longer for a computer to process. The Foldit gamers succeeded in building 3D models of the enzyme protease that will enable the design more sophisticated and more effective antiretroviral drugs.
The interconnectedness that social networks foster has strengthened crowdsourcing. Combined with an open-source ethic, the idea has the potential to revolutionize all facets of society, including medicine, government, and the arts. Crowdsourcing’s power was in full effect during the Arab Spring. The populaces of Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries used Facebook as a platform for organizing rallies, posting stories, and sharing articles; Twitter for vital communication and real-time news; and YouTube to become broadcast journalists and upload videos of the protests and resulting violence.
Read through our story to find out how crowdsourcing is helping the blind sort out daily problems, assembling a country’s constitution, matching volunteers to causes, bringing new ideas to market, and sourcing funds from the rich to give to the poor.
1. Audience Participation
Filmmakers hope for crowds on opening day, but “Life in a Day(Opens in a new window)” is a film made by a crowd. Famed director Ridley Scott’s production company backed YouTube’s appeal to amateur filmmakers to record some of their experiences of July 24, 2010. The film’s director Kevin Macdonald conceived the idea and included a nod to a crowdsourcing project of a prior century. Macdonald asked entrants to record what they loved, feared, and were carrying in their pockets. This echoed the work of documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jenning’s Mass Observation project in which he asked 500 English citizens to keep a diary or answer a questionnaire about their everyday lives. The best of the “Life in a Day” entries were culled and assembled into a moving documentary of a single day on earth told from a multitude of viewpoints. The film opened this past summer.
2. By the People, For the People
All members of a democracy ideally have an equal say, though it rarely works out that way. Iceland was willing to follow that spirit when it opened up the writing of a new constitution to its citizens. Draft clauses were open to public comment on the constitutional committee’s Web site and its meetings were streamed live. Some suggested changes made their way into the document, which is currently before the parliament. For those who want to keep track of its progress, the government has active Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts.
3. Native Speaker
The Native American words for buffalo are nearly as sparse as the number of the creatures freely roaming the plains. Biagio Arobba, a software engineer and member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, is trying to remedy that with LiveAndTell(Opens in a new window). The site attempts to preserve the many dialects of the indigenous language. Users contribute photos with audio tags for the objects in them and can create storybooks that lead site visitors through mini lessons. The crowdsource welcomes uploaded content from speakers of any language but with Native American dialect fluency dwindling fast, Arobba is making a concerted effort to recruit tribes to participate.
4. Brother, Can You Spare Some Time?
One of the reasons people volunteer is because they want to be part of a larger, collective effort. Sparked.com aligns this idea with crowdsourcing. The site matches nonprofits and microvolunteers—those who have limited time and specific skills to lend to a project. The site funnels volunteers into areas of interest such as the environment or animals and then further separates the herd into skills like fundraising, copywriting, design, IT, research, SEO, blogging, marketing, operations, social media, technology, research, web, and human resources. The volunteers can then see how many people share their interests and how many challenges are available for them to tackle. To sign up, participants log in from either their Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Linkedin account.
5. Patient, Heal Thyself
Clinical trials can be the last hope for many that urgently seek to alleviate disease symptoms or be cured of an illness. But the chances of being selected to participate are slim, the pace of the study can be glacial, and after all that the patient may have been given a placebo. Those are some of the reasons why patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease) visit the site PatientsLikeMe(Opens in a new window). They embarked on their own crowdsourced clinical trial when they heard that lithium carbonate could slow the disease’s progression. Patients enrolled themselves—asking their physicians for a prescription—and tracked their results. PatientsLikeMe mapped the findings against those of other patients and published the results in Nature Biotechnology. While the crowdsourced study didn’t have the rigors of a traditional clinical trial, more data produced more quickly can help patients better navigate their options.
6. Trying to Make a Hundred Dollars Out of 10,000 Cents
“Ten Thousand Cents” is a crowdsourced art piece that costs and sells for exactly that price. Artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to hire 10,000 artists to paint a small portion of an image of a $100 bill. None of the artists was aware of the larger scope of the work. Color laser prints of it are available for $100, which goes to the One Laptop Per Child program. The artists say “Ten Thousand Cents” is meant to explore digital labor markets, crowdsourcing, virtual economies, and digital reproduction.
7. Fair-Weather Friends
Meteorological Web site Weather Underground(Opens in a new window) counts on weather enthusiasts to supply data beyond the same national and international information that its competitors also receive. Over 20,000 people have set up personal weather stations for Weather Underground, letting the company assess its predictions from real-life models. Those who volunteer stake their own money (which can exceed $1,000) and maintain the stations. It’s not just Weather Underground that relies on them, but also the site’s nearly 20 million monthly visitors and clients like Google and the Associated Press.
8. Sourcing from the Rich to Give to the Poor
The Robin Hood Foundation found a hero in Lady Gaga this past spring when she helped it publicize two Facebook contests to raise money for the impoverished of New York City. One contest handled amassing a million clicks to match Lady Gaga’s million-dollar donation and the second let fans vote on a charity to donate the money to. The foundation met its goal of 1 million votes, distributing the resulting bounty of $1 million primarily to the winner, SCO Family of Services, and the rest among the other entrants.
9. Sight Beyond Sight
Stevie Wonder recently extended his gratitude to Steve Jobs for making iOS accessible to the blind. “Because there’s nothing on the iPhone or the iPad that you can do that I can’t do,” Wonder told an audience at one of his performances. Now there’s this: VizWiz(Opens in a new window), an iOS app developed by the University of Rochester’s Rochester Human Computer Interaction program. The app lets the blind crowdsource an answer to daily tasks that confound them, such as identifying denominations of bills in their wallet or sorting out a cabinet of canned goods. The wait time for an answer is relatively short; once VizWiz is turned on, a server is alerted that a question may be asked soon and pings volunteers or Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to stand by to provide an answer.
10. Design by Committee
Market research can save some inventors untold thousands of dollars but it can also cost that much. Quirky.com charges just $10 to crowdsource an idea. If it’s popular enough, it could advance with the help of a community of “influencers” and might just get to be one of the two products the company puts out each week. Quirky.com itself has moved on, branching into television. The site has a monthly show on HSN, where it sells some products and a six-episode reality series on the Sundance Channel(Opens in a new window).
[ad_2]
Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-wisdom-of-crowdsourcing