Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions.

Remember this concept if you ever decide to run a crowdsourcing, idea generation, or co-creation system with your customers — or anyone, for that matter. Simply making the tools available will do not good. Nor will a vague sense of who is in charge. Central leadership is still necessary. Enterprises shouldn’t believe that putting a project out in the wild without definitive leadership and support will produce anything of value. Everything needs a champion to drive it forward.

Simple enough, but the real value I see created in what I write about here has sprung out of a – sometimes hypothetical – balancing and blending of external inputs or votes or intellectual property or funding or designs with a strong plan, leadership, and vision. That includes rejecting bad ideas. Saying NO to your customers when you feel strongly about it (37 Signals’ favorite past-time.). Retaining focus on what is important and getting rid of the extraneous.

Essentially: co-creation doesn’t take the work out of what you do but it can enhance it and help you more deeply understand the people you serve.

Open source succeeds under a benevolent dictatorship — and so do co-creation projects is a post from: co>innovative

Collaborative (or crowdsourced) content creation: A group effort to contribute to and edit portions of content for the expressed aim of producing a specific overarching project.

For some reason, examples of collaborative creativity keep popping up in the film-making arena. It’s Our Movie began with a script and a director (Alex Jovy, an Oscar Nominated Producer) and used the community to find its actors. (While this may not technically fall under “content creation”, it does bring a community into the overall creative process of a film.) Anyone could upload an audition for one of the characters and then the best were voted up. A Swarm Of Angels was a more ambitious project in which everything from the concept to script, casting to funding was created by the crowd. (It was up and running for several years but now the website is under construction, status unclear.)

CoWrite is essentially a script writing competition in 10 page increments. Each week anyone can enter a submission (along with $10) and, each week, the best entry is awarded $3,000 by an internal panel of judges and becomes the next 10 pages of the script. The final script will then be rewritten by one of the weekly winners who will be paid $5K. Another perk of winning is a meeting with Benderspink (Production company behin American Pie, A History of Violence) who will also review the final script and decide what to do with it from there.

Assignment Zero, a project sparked by Jeff Howe who coined “crowdsourcing” and Jay Rosen, began with the goal of having “a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond.” Jeff Howe considered it “a highly satisfying failure“.

In some cases, the experience of contributing itself becomes the purpose of a project, not what is produced in the end. Contributing a sentence to a growing story can be enjoyable and creatively inspiring regardless of the poor end result of the totality of the project. And, as creative types know, most of what you produce, regardless of your brilliance and success, will be poor.

Any other examples I’ve missed?

Wikipedia
A Swarm of Angels
It’s Our Movie (The movie is in production as of winter 08/09.)
Ze Frank The great and noble Ze Frank who has called on his community to write, draw, execute power moves, and make earth sandwiches in order to create works of art and entertainment and bring joy to the downtrodden…
Assignment Zero
Protagonize supports “addventure” which is collaborative writing in which people can branch stories off into new paths
Spike Lee Nokia Ad

Read the rest of the Crowdsourcing article series.

Part 8: Collaborative Content Creation; or, Crowdsourcing your way to creativity is a post from: co>innovative

Help Obama prioritize and solve problems with the Citizens Briefing book: Of course, it’s inauguration week, so how could I resist? Leading up to the transition (and going forward, I assume) the Obama administration has set up the Citizens Briefing Book on change.gov which allows you to suggest ideas and priorities for Obama and vote on the best ones. These will be compiled and presented to the President. Regardless of whether it turns into something of substance or not, it is a great example of what I discussed in Part 3, the Digital Suggestion Box. As with any of these efforts whether it be from Dell, Starbucks, or Obama, the impact this technology will have depends on how whether it becomes a useful, two-way conduit of information. Are popular measures acted upon or, at the very least, responded to? (Case in point: the first and third most popular ideas with 16,000 votes involve relaxing or doing away with marijuana prohibitions.) And is the tool effective at surfacing quality?

Crowdsourcing classifications: via MadeForOne, Scott Klososky at TechnologyStory lists his view on classifications of crowdsourcing:

Voluntary vs. Involuntary
Social vs. Commercial
Rewarded vs. Unrewarded

CoInnovative Roundup: 3 Odds and Ends to check out is a post from: co>innovative

(To be sure we’re on the same page:
Innovation networks = “Firms seamlessly weave internally and externally available invention and innovation services to optimize the profitability of their products, services, and business models.”
Crowdsourcing = sourcing small and large jobs from anyone and everyone.
Expert sourcing = sourcing from specialized, professional-grade, vetted experts.
Wisdom of crowds = the wisdom of the crowd’s collective intelligence outweighs any individuals.)

Expert sourcing involves several actors that fall into the mold of innovation networks:
Inventor: the experts (enterprise R&D, academics, government labs, retired technicians, you know, experts.)
Transformers and Financiers: corporations who buy, develop, and fund the innovations
Broker: expert sourcing providers who bring together the experts and corporations.

Innovation networks and expert sourcing further erode the purpose and importance of the large corporation and a massive, closed R&D facility. With the aggregation, moderation and policing of transactions, NineSigma and Innocentive facilitate this possibility. Along with online collaboration improvements, the need to have a large building or organization under which a multitude of people need to sit are further eroded. Smaller, more focused enterprises are made possible as transaction and search costs between inventor and transformers/financiers decrease (lower transaction costs, after all, are the reason companies formed in the first place).

While it appears this market is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, companies large and small will not be able to afford to only look for internally for innovations, they must search the horizon, getting input and help from customers, suppliers, and experts around the world. Tool providers are and will continue to emerge on all fronts, but if firms do not weave these tools and innovation sources into their processes, they will eventually be left behind. The key, of course, is not to hand over the reigns to outside innovators or customer whims but to incorporate the knowledge gained into your own expertise and discretion to mold it into real, profitable innovation.

Companies in the space:
Innocentive (Problems issued to recruited scientists)
NineSigma (Sends out RFPs to network of universities, inventors, businesses)
YourEncore (Posts projects to retired technical people)
yet2 (Matching and providing services/resources to IP buyers/sellers)

Further reading:
HBR: Getting Unusual Suspects to Solve R&D Puzzles
If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone
Nine Sigma – Expert Response to Innocentive Post
Open Innovation Becoming Key to R&D Success

Part 6: Expert sourcing for problem solving and innovation is a post from: co>innovative

Open source software, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, user-generated content, social networks, the sharing economy, peer production, Multi-User Virtual Environments, participatory media, collaborative creativity. Distributed capitalism. These are all terms in the rapidly expanding lexicon of the field of ‘user-led innovation’. For much of the 20th century business operated on an enterprise logic of ‘managerial capitalism’ which maintains that value is created by organisational producers and is stored inside the products and services they sell.

Quoting Eric von Hippel:

Historically the assumption has been that manufacturers are the innovators, they go and they look at users, understand what they need and then develop something in response. We then went and looked at the histories of innovation and found out that very often, very commercially successful products actually had been developed by users at the leading edge of a market-based trend first. So it appeared that in fact innovation was user-led, which means that the users actually develop prototype products and show their value and use of what they really want.

These lead users (who can be viewed as pre-early adopters, creating their own solutions) have entered into an increasingly ideal epoch in which more and more tools are available every day to innovate: tools of media production and distribution, rapid fabrication tools such as widely available laser cutters and 3D printers, communication with other enthusiasts, etc. This distributed capitalism is the result of the democratization of innovation that Eric Von Hippel wrote about in the aptly titled Democratizing Innovation

.

Below is a great classification of four successful and productive user-led niches:

If you ever find yourself scratching your head about exactly what I am talking about, I would highly recommend reading the report.
(Also wanted to say Hi to Paul.)

User-led innovation report, the Australians get it. is a post from: co>innovative

This is not to denigrate any of these areas, it is simply to say that they have been applied to so many areas since then as to make them essentially meaningless. Of course, Web 2.0 itself never had a narrow, well-defined meaning — O’Reilly’s initial description of it was a slide with about 25 bubbles on it each with a different concept in it.

It is not the crowds producing the wisdom but the individuals in the crowd whose collective wisdom creates value. Dave Winer agrees saying “I am not part of a crowd, I am an individual” There seem to be two distinct things going on: tapping into the collective individual intelligence of a group of people (prediction markets, Threadless picks, popularity, ratings) and tapping into individual contributors or empowering individual contributors to participate in something that would classically be taken care of within the firm, via a contract with another firm, or via a professional relationship (what Jeff Howe would consider true crowdsourcing).

So, unless you are tapping into a crowd and, in the end, paying someone in that crowd to produce work that you would classically outsource or hire externally for, you are not crowdsourcing. You are likely creating a community, tapping into the wisdom of crowds, getting feedback, and on and on. The very fact that there are so many different things going on, is why I am — VERY slowly — working my way through a multi-part look at every different aspect of what is going on and how it will effect business and communication.

Can’t we come up with anything better than crowdsourcing? is a post from: co>innovative