The big issue in this room – what is definition of crowdsourcing?

What’s the lowest common denominator for these types of products – is it the sharing of data – making it public? Is it opening a challenge up to the public?

E.g. is Feral Dogs really a crowdsourced project as instigator gave robot dogs to small groups of kids in workshops rather than to “the crowd”?

Crowd sources projects have central mechanism that instigates and aggregrates.

Size is probably a factor.

Allowing amateurs to do what experts normally do. Crowd sourcing is also about crowd to share in the interpretation and analysis.

True crowdsourcing has people commenting, correcting other people and moving up in rankings. Kate – looking at outcomes across citizen science projects – Audubon – just wants your data, to Univ Delaware project where local citizens work with local scientist and do true science.

Some are about collecting from the public and others are about making public date more useful for the public (Trees Near You app)

Have to give people a structure, make it easy, like Exquisite Clock.

Boundary between participatory design and crowd sourcing – crowd sourcing ones seem to have a destination – solving a problem, creating something collaboratively. Participatory design is more about having an experience rather than collaborating on an outcome. There’s a goal as well as a purpose, transparency, joint ownership,

It’s a powerful tool that allows us to do things together that we’re unable to do individually.

Amanda mentions new york’s 311 initiative – collecting the data on what people have called about – uses the phone not computer; NYC wants to parse the data. The opposite is the rapid iteration that is possible with crowdsourced research like BigApps competition.