CROWDSOURCING What it is and what it is not,example ideas sharing crowdsourcing project ideas4all This is the written full version of the presentation made at Tedx Plaza Cibeles Madrid on the 25th of June 2011 Below the YouTube link for those of you who prefer the video version To ideate or not to ideate that is the question

2. This is the written full version of the presentation made at
Tedx Plaza Cibeles Madrid on the 25th of June 2011
Below the YouTube link for those of you who prefer the
video version
http://t.co/SWnGWZq

3. When I was a child I had a dream:
I wanted to travel into the Clouds to reach
“las tres Marías” of ORION, because I
believed they were the center of the
connected network of stars, ideas and living
beings in the Universe.

4. My father, a Spanish Republican and a Medical
Doctor, said to me “everything is possible, there are
no limits to ideas”
My mother, a Venezuelan Physics and Math
Professor, said “ it is not the quantity of time what is
important but the quality of time spent on your
dreams what is”
They loved me, and I believed them.

5. My 1st experience with a Crowd was in 1958, I was seven years
old. It was when the Venezuelan People decided they could no
longer accept repression and abuses from its Dictator, and
everyone lived and spoke about that with passion.

6. Before, then
It took 9 months to achieve critical mass since the “Pastoral Manifesto”
was read in May 1957 in all Catholic Pulpits followed by Popular
mobilization of Crowds. The 23rd of January 1958 Pérez Jiménez
had to flee the country in the “Sacred Cow” airplane.

7. After, now
It took less than a month in 2011 to end the Tunisian and Egyptian
regimes. The new technologies lower costs, wider access and social
networks connections to the outside world permitted faster
communications and organization of protests which accelerated
growth of a critical mass for crowds’ political actions.

8. My 2nd crowd experience, in 1960, had to do with music and it was
becoming part of the school choir, you networked, learnt and shared
with other girls older and taller than you from different classes, at the
time, it was the best part of school: to have a crowd listen.

9. Before, then and now
Eric Whitacer
It took then, in 1960, and takes now more than a year to synchronize
and fine tune a good performing Choir. We need to learn music
scores and find time to meet, practice and rehearse after school
hours, as well as being together in the same place at the same time.
Photos from video Cloudbursting2222

10. After, now
It took less than 4 months in 2010 to create a Virtual Choir from 12
countries with 185 voices and 234 tracks recorded in different
locations and times. The new technologies permitted a virtual choir
song performance 'Lux Aurumque‘ (Light and Gold).
Created by Eric Whitacer.

11. It is the wisdom of crowds working.
A new curtain opens up for new ideas.

12. I always felt in my professional and personal life that we
all had many ideas and that, good or bad, most of them
were wasted. I felt when my father died of Alzheimer
December 2005, that I should do something about that.

13. ideas must be connected like stars…. And in 2008
we created an ideas, free vertical social network to connect them.

14. I believed we should not let ideas fade in a limbo with
no memory, we needed a place to share them and
leave them for others to use.

15. 85% of internet users do feel that they very
often or sometimes have ideas that are
wasted because there is not an easy way to
share and channel them.
TNS Research in UK USA and India (1154)
60
50,8
50
40
34,1
30
IDEATORS 20
11,1
QUESTORS 10
3,9
CREATORS 0
Sometimes Have no ideas w orth sharing
Very often Know w here to place ideas

16. Rene Descartes
“Cogito ergo sum” ( I think, therefore I am)
The simple meaning of the phrase is that someone
wondering whether or not he exists is, in and of
itself, proof that he does exist
William Shakespeare
“To be or not to be that is the question”
Hamlets' Soliloquy

17. It would be nice to implant the verb
to ideate
and the word ideator
To ideate or not to ideate that is the question

18. SHARING
% Main Reason to Post IDEAS, by gender
40 34
35 32
30
30
25
19
20 17 17 17 17
12 13
15 9 9 9
7 8 7
10 5
3
5
0
Total
Male
Female

19. Not everyone has the same interests, each one has its Element (Robinson)
Environment care and Sustainability Universal trends.

20. 2009 2011
Unsolicited ideas in the Cloud come from everywhere and anyone.

21. Of course you feel proud of what you build but not always,
We committed errors along the way. We learned to live on β permanent
Crowdusers conversations are most rewarding.

22. Connecting over 100.000 people to share ideas in a network
like the fishermen's nets.

23. You need to take care of the network; sometime the users (the fish)
break them in some places and teach you to do them better.

24. ideAs
SHARING and LESSONS
• Collective idea sharing is the first motivator
• 76% of ideas are posted under creative commons and that surprised us.
• Negative votes are perverse, are boomerangs to community build. They were
responsible for our 1st community mutiny.
• Profiles, Recognition, Ego trips and different rankings are most appreciated
• Entrepreneurs and VCs do not visit to find ideas jet
• Ideas are not as sexy as music or tweets

25. ideas can come from all
All Minds have ideas
12 million visits since launch
211countries i.e. 90% + of world
users 180 countries 6.565 locations
ideas 118 countries 3,065 cities/locations.

26. Charles McKay Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds 1841
The crowd can also be irrational looking back at the Tulip Bulb Bubble Market.
In 1600 Holland the Bulb prices= 6x annual salaries.

27. Yet they are so beautiful that the crowd loved and longed for Tulips
I cant miss what others see in them so I shall also buy by imitation on
this Tulip Mania Market.

28. But we are better than Herds, we are no sheep mimicking all the
time the others, as some say. No we can be a wise crowd.

29. Albert-László Barabássi Linked 2003
How everything is connected to everything else
And networks despite being Complex systems always
surprise us with the simplicity of its laws
Nature had an Underlying Universal Law

30. Could anyone in the audience tell us What is Paretos' principle ?

31. What is Paretos' principle ?
His love for the mathematical beauty 20% 80%
of Newtonian Physics, conformed Effort Results
his dream: making economics into
an exact Science.

32. Could anyone in the audience tell us which is the Internet principle ?

33. Coined by Ben McConnell
and Jackie Huba 2006
1%
9%
What is network Internet principle ?
the 1% rule or the 90–9–1 principle
lurks contributors creators
Reflects a theory that more people will lurk in 90%
a virtual community than will participate. This
term is often used to refer to participation
inequality in the context of the Internet.

34. Coined by Ben McConnell
and Jackie Huba 2006
1%
20%
the 1% rule or the 90–9–1 principle
In ideas4all Crowd/Community
registered users contributors active creators
79%

35. What is the small world principle ?
The online networks behave like small worlds there is a power law that
rules them, they are scale free irrespective of their size, space, time.
The distance is smaller than 6 degrees connections precisely because we
are linked.

36. My facebook network beautiful fractals
Symmetry and the beauty of physics are inside the web
and the online and cloud crowdsourcing communities.

37. How much do you think this cow weights ?

38. James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds 2005
Francis Galton Philadelphia , the crowd guessing
the weight of an Ox
“Under the right circumstances groups are
remarkably intelligent, and are often
smarter than the smartest people in them”
In my opinion it is because crowds act like a Global Brain
Multiknowledged and Multitasked

39. Jeff Howe coined Crowdsourcing in Wired 2006
Published Crowdsourcing 2008
The White Paper Version:
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally
performed by a designated agent (usually an
employee) and outsourcing it to an
undefined, generally large group of people in the form
of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version:
The application of Open Source principles to fields
outside of software.
And one of the best definitions although long by…

40. TED Conversations If you were a member of Virtual Choir, Eric Whitacre's
incredible global collaboration please share your story &
journey with us & the world
Maria Petrova
Apr 3 2011: Eric Whitacre's music — to me — is healing in sound form.

41. I'm so moved by the fact that MY CONTRIBUTION WAS WANTED, and WELCOME.
My voice? Really? ANYBODY'S voice? It's so DEMOCRATIC and welcoming and
loving, and I'm so MOVED By the OPENNESS. What I couldn't offer in clarity, a
SKILLED sound engineer made up for by scrubbing my video. My energetic
CONTRIBUTION is there, and so much of my HEART is in this video, because I feel
so much love from the song, from Eric, and from EVERYONE who participated. It's an
experience of resplendent UNITY and ACCEPTANCE, despite weaknesses, above
COMPETITION, where everyone came as they were, and we sound and LOOK
GLORIOUS for it. The vision we now SHARE, of CREATING experiences that UNITE
PEOPLE ACROSS BORDERS, across SPACE AND TIME, despite individual
differences, is thanks to this Choir. Thank you, Eric, and thank you, everyone, for your
missives of love in this GALACTIC EXPERIENCE. We truly TOOK PART in something
THAT MATTERS.

42. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire... If only 4% of the audience knows the
answer... Statistics will reveal results as follows : 24%, 24%, 24%, and
28%! Over 90% of times the audience will be right vs. 65% for experts.

43. Crowds that are diverse, with different degrees expertise,
disagreement and contest take better decisions.

44. Crowd wisdom starts to fail when people collaborate... It becomes
groupthink, similar to a cluster of experts. The novelty/diversity of the crowd
is what recruits novel answers...so,. it's not who you know (as in, know
well), but it is who you don't know well... Thus avoiding group think.

45. Chris Anderson
“The Long Tail” 2006
Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
“The “Long Tail” – the extensive, online, sustained reach of
smaller, low-volume specialized products, the “hidden majority,”
the vast assortment of books, films, recordings that don’t become
popular hits can be garbage but also include lots of quality
products that “one-size-fits-all” gatekeepers bypass
“Let the customers do the work” – Google, eBay and Craigslist rely
heavily on their customers’ labor. Self-service is the key.
Customers handle shipping, inventory and tracking.
Forget about outsourcing; this trend is “crowdsourcing.”
I believe that is best to have more diverse
niche people producing more smaller ideas
the long tail MULTIPLICITY DISCOVERY

46. Charles McKay
Matt Evans Mozilla The Power of Crowdsourcing 2010
Crowdsourcing is here to stay
“So, I’m glad that uTest is making a go of it. I think the explosion of
social networking over the past years has really made it apparent
that the virtual crowd is a very powerful thing. It can solve lots of
interesting problems we know about now, and I’m sure we will be
discovering areas where crowdsourcing can be very effective in
the future… So, I think crowdsourcing is a practice that is here to
stay and will be with us in some form for as long as the web stays
running.”

47. • Is not OUTSOURCING
• It is the generalization of OPENSOURCE
• NOT A STANDARD phenomena with one formula /manual
• It is diverse and has a SPECTRUM
• INCLUSIVE of Community participation and Crowdsourcing,
and in between all kinds of HYBRIDS
•The Long tail participation is important to enhance DISCOVERY

48. Google reference results in Millions
0
2
4
6
8
10
12

49. Then you want to continue your dream with no boundaries and not only
you want to build the open Global Brain but to transform the idea
generation as the first step on open innovation of
Companies, Citizens and Institutions, and then again you find you are
not alone and many people are working on that as well.

50. Nelson Mandela
“It always seems
impossible until it's done ”
His picture done with
crowd pictures

51. What we have learned from the open social
network, we bring to the Cloud for
Companies, Citizens and Institutions
INNOVATION AGORA

52. The principal barrier to companies innovation is middle
management
There is important internal resistance to what Stefan
Lindegaard calls “the antibodies of change”
There is no democratization, no retro-feedback
or synergies in traditional innovation

53. We need to change the internal Darth Wider within
Organizations/Institutions to promote real open innovation by the crowds
external and internal, the DWs like it and commit to innovation early in
the new process.

54. 1. Crowds have better collective wisdom than
individuals, experts, corporations
2. People want to participate and share, amateurism
3. 90% is no good, 9% is good, 1% of crowd ideas are very good
4. Motivate, Reward them, let them feel good, like gaming
5. Diversity trumps expertise, getting outside the boundaries also important
In the web the Multitude is there ready for Crowdsourcing

55. 6. Need to foster right atmosphere for collective wisdom, a common or
loosely common goal
7. Harvest Crowd creation and long tail’s discovery
8. Let crowd sift vote. Among the 20 most voted are the best
9. Democratization, transparency, independence, decentralization,
authenticity, fun works increases employee participation up to 40% in
the 1st month and 90% after one year
10. KISS Keep it simple and small (tasks and goals)
In the web the Multitude is there ready for Crowdsourcing

57. idea
Crowdsourced design. Those are my ideas if you don’t like them I have more

58. executed
We made the idea happen. Those are my ideas if you don’t like them I have more

59. Different NGOs
Making others’ dreams come true via the crowd.

60. “Our Constitution... is called democracy because power is not in
the hands of a few but of the majority”
Thucydides
And the majority is the Multitude the Crowd

61. Before,
“Chance favors the prepared mind “
Attributed to Pascal
Now ,
“In the Cloud, Chance favors the prepared Crowd”
Crowds are the DNA of the future communities and organizations as well
as disruptive Innovation and Progress channels towards the Stars

62. Our great Team, Crowds Collective
participation and Crowdsourcing , have
permitted my dream come true and
my coming closer and closer to
“las tres Marías” of ORION,
the center of the connected network of
stars, ideas and living beings in the
Universe

63. “las tres Marías”
All Minds are Intelligent and have ideas
Multitasked crowdsourcing the DNA of progress
Multitudes and Mambo !!!
Crowds can be orchestrated to make their instruments
dance openly to Innovation

64. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_El7qwib0dc&feature=related
Orquesta Juvenil Simón Bolívar de Venezuela - BBC Proms 2007 300.000
youngsters from poverty to musicians in 30 years. Maestro Abreu’s dream.

65. IN YOUTH WE TRUST
15M Plaza THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE TODAY
Thanks to Wikipedia and other Google images sources
@anamariallopis
anamaria@ideas4all.com