The Disputed Value of Customer Engagement and Feedback
At the heart of everything I talk about here is 1) increased engagement in production and consumption by consumers and 2) increased market awareness and customer feedback for business.
March Crowdsourcing Odds and Ends
CloudFab now in Open Beta CloudFab recently launched into open beta, so you can now access their network of 3D printers. Just upload an STL file (a standard CAD file type) with a few instructions and specifications as to the printing process you are looking for and you will quickly get back quotes from shops [...]
Open 100: Finding the top 100 open innovators in the world
Openbusiness.cc is running a competition to find the top 100 best open innovators in the world, highlighting achievements in open innovation, crowdsourcing, co-creation, open source software, and open business.
Google Predicts the Present… and soon The Future
Every day hundreds of millions of people type their thoughts, needs, and desires into Google’s search box. Aggregate those and track them over time and you can begin to see patterns, in flu epidemics, the economy, products, candidates — just about anything really.
Open source succeeds under a benevolent dictatorship — and so do co-creation projects
Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail) recently articulated an interesting metaphor regarding social media and driving a project/organization forward. In his post Open source is a company; social media is a country I would call particular attention to his take on successful open source projects: Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, [...]
Cognitive Surplus: What are you going to do with yours? Clay Shirky explains…
Some of you might wonder why anyone would participate in many of the activities discussed here or whether it is all sustainable given that they result in little to – more commonly – no money, should ponder what Clay Shirky has to say about what he calls Cognitive Surplus, a concept I just can’t get enough of.
Part 8: Collaborative Content Creation; or, Crowdsourcing your way to creativity
Crowdsourcing or collaboratively creating content of any kind becomes dicey very quickly and the odds of creating something greater than the sum of its parts are low. In fact, creating by committee generally leads to utter crap. (When was the last time you read and enjoyed a story written line by line by contributors?) But with collaborative sites and, in my view, a talented orchestrator, it might be possible to create something of quality or, at least, facilitate an interesting experience, regardless of the end product.
