Solving Big-Data Bottleneck

Cameron, David. "Solving Big-Data Bottleneck." Harvard Medical School, February 7, 2013. 

From the report: "In a study that represents a potential cultural shift in how basic science research can be conducted, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and London Business School have demonstrated that a crowdsourcing platform pioneered in the commercial sector can solve a complex biological problem more quickly than conventional approaches—and at a fraction of the cost." Read more

Crowdsourcing Grows Up as Online Workers Unite

Hodson, Hal. "Crowdsourcing Grows Up as Online Workers Unite." New Scientist, February 7, 2013. 

From the article: "Crowdsourcing might be big business now but it has never been fair. The pay is terrible, there is zero regulation and no recourse for workers if things go wrong. But crowdsourcing's Wild West days of exploitation could soon be over. Moves to make employers more accountable and give crowd workers more benefits are helping shift the balance in favour of the employees." Read more

Managing Crowd Innovation in Public Administration

Collm, Alexandra, and Kuno Schedler. "Managing Crowd Innovation in Public Administration." International Public Management Review 13 (2012): 1-18. 

From the report: "Governments all over the world have discovered the world of social media, for better or for worse. Whereas some of them are making every effort to prevent the unhierarchical and therefore uncontrollable (dissident) opinion-forming process in Web 2.0, others are looking for ways of putting the potentialities of this new opening-up of communication to use. One approach that is increasingly being tried out is opening up innovation processes in government. However, this opening-up of innovation processes is anything but trivial. It requires a thoroughly thought-out strategy and thus confronts government systems with extensive challenges if it is not to suffer the same fate as other unsuccessful attempts at reform in the past. In our essay, we reflect on the consequences of these challenges for public managers." Read more

Kickstarter Launched 18,000 Projects in 2012; 17 Raised More than $1 Million

Dewey, Caitlin. "Kickstarter Launched 18,000 Projects in 2012; 17 Raised More than $1 Million." The Washington Post, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "Kickstarter reports that its 2.2 million members pledged more than $319 million in 2012, up 221 percent from the year before. But more striking, perhaps, is the scale of some of Kickstarter’s latest success stories. While no project had raised $1 million at this time last year, 17 projects passed that mark in 2012." Read more

'Crowdfunding' Sites Pay Medical Bills, Raise Hopes

Alkon, Cheryl. "'Crowdfunding' Sites Pay Medical Bills, Raise Hopes." USA Today, January 11, 2013. 

From the article: "More people are turning to crowdfunding sites to ask friends, and friends of friends, for help with medical bills, accident costs and much more. But, surprise: Strangers give, too." Read more

The Theory of Crowd Capital

Prpic, John, and Prashant Shukla. "The Theory of Crowd Capital." Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences 46, Maui, Hawaii, USA, January 2013. IEEE Computer Society Press, Forthcoming.

From the report: "We are seeing more and more organizations undertaking activities to engage dispersed populations through Information Systems (IS). Using the knowledge-based view of the organization, this work conceptualizes a theory of Crowd Capital to explain this phenomenon. Crowd Capital is a heterogeneous knowledge resource generated by an organization, through its use of Crowd Capability, which is defined by the structure, content, and process by which an organization engages with the dispersed knowledge of individuals –the Crowd. Our work draws upon a diverse literature and builds upon numerous examples of practitioner implementations to support our theorizing. We present a model of Crowd Capital generation in organizations and discuss the implications of Crowd Capital on organizational boundary and on IS research." Read more

The Future of Crowd Work

Kittur, Aniket, Nickerson, Jeffrey V. Bernstein, Michael S., et al. "The Future of Crowd Work." Paper to be presented at the 16th ACM Conference on Computer Supported cooperative Work 2013, Forthcoming.

From the report: "Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation." Read more

Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control

Saxton, Gregory D., Oh, Onook, and Rajiv Kishore. "Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control." Information System Management, forthcoming.  

From the report: "In this paper, we first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates “crowds,” outsourcing, and social web technologies. We then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing websites using content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on our analysis, we develop a “taxonomic theory” of crowdsourcing by organizing the empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. We also discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial control systems." Read more

Crowds Are Not People, My Friend

Koerth-Baker, Maggie. "Crowds Are Not People, My Friend." The New York Times Magazine, December 18, 2012. 

From the article: "This assumption that crowds have some non-fragmented consciousness leads us to the false dichotomy we draw between physical and virtual crowds: one is dumb, the other is smart. But in both cases, we’re placing too much emphasis on the crowd as distinct from the people involved in it. …

This has real-world consequences. When police officers show up at a protest or political rally, they tend to think of the crowd in Le Bonian terms, McPhail told me. That can be dangerous. If the police assume the crowd is acting as one, it becomes easier for a handful of people to provoke a violent reaction from law enforcement — and vice versa. McPhail uses what he has learned from 40 years of studying groups of people to advise law enforcement on better, safer ways to deal with crowds. He told me that 150 years of records from Europe and the United States show violence happens at less than 15 percent of political gatherings. So he instructs officers to never respond categorically to a crowd. If one person is breaking the law, address that person in an unobtrusive way. “If you are blatant and violent, you affect people who weren’t doing anything, and that . . . turns them against you,” he said.

At the same time, knowing that virtual crowds are merely human helps us better predict when one is likely to be smart and when it’s likely to be stupid. Reddit can help someone understand a medical diagnosis just as easily as it can foster a men’s rights movement. Scientists, working as a virtual group, are capable of sharing diverse research to reach a consensus on climate change, but they’re also capable of passing down the received wisdom that crowds have minds. The group itself isn’t what matters. What matters is who they are, what they know and how they interact." Read more

Let the Crowd Fix Your Product's Bugs

McAfee, Andrew. "Let the Crowd Fix Your Product's Bugs." Harvard Business Review Blog, November 6, 2012. 

From the article: "I'm starting to come to the conclusion that of all the myths businesses and their leaders tell themselves, one of the most harmful is that they know where the expertise is. The more I learn about the results from crowdsourcing and open innovation efforts, the more I believe that the smart strategy is to expose your problems and challenges to as many people as possible and let them show you what they can do. Here's my most recent example of the power of this approach." Read more

Charity Creates World's First Citizen Science Project to Speed Up Cancer Research

"Charity Creates World's First Citizen Science Project to Speed Up Cancer Research." Cancer Research UK, October 24, 2012.

From the article: "Cancer Research UK has launched the first ever interactive website - www.clicktocure.net - that will allow the public to delve into real-life cancer data from research archives and speed up lifesaving research, outside of the laboratory.

At the moment, cancer samples are given special stains that highlight certain molecules as part of research. These molecules could reveal how a patient will respond to treatment. But this process is slow and analysis is mostly done by trained pathologists, who are often also cancer researchers." Read more

Intelligence Agencies Turn to Crowdsourcing

Weinberger, Sharon. "Intelligence Agencies Turn to Crowdsourcing." BBC, October 10, 2012.

From the article: "Research firm Applied ResearchAssociates, has just launched a website that invites the public—meaning anyone, anywhere—to sign up and try their hand at intelligence forecasting. The website is part of an effort, sponsored by the IntelligenceAdvanced Research Projects Activity (Iarpa), to understand the potential benefits of so-called crowdsourcing for predicting future events. Crowdsourcing aims to use the “wisdom of crowds” and was popularised by projects like Wikipedia." Read more