Robin White Owen – THATCamp Museum Computer Network 2010 http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org The Humanities and Technology Camp Sat, 30 Oct 2010 18:08:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.12 Session Notes (Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds) http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/10/30/session-notes-tapping-the-wisdom-of-crowds/ http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/10/30/session-notes-tapping-the-wisdom-of-crowds/#comments Sat, 30 Oct 2010 18:04:15 +0000 http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/?p=328

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.

]]> http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/10/30/session-notes-tapping-the-wisdom-of-crowds/feed/ 1 Ways to Tap the Wisdom of Crowds http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/10/08/ways-to-tap-the-wisdom-of-crowds/ http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/10/08/ways-to-tap-the-wisdom-of-crowds/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 03:44:08 +0000 http://mcn2010.thatcamp.org/?p=176

Museums are looking for successful ways to engage new audiences and create communities of interest, on the internet and through mobile technologies. Crowd sourced projects are one means to accomplish these goals and there are many inspiring, useful and playful projects out there.

We’re proposing an unconference session that looks at a handful of successful examples to see how they are relevant to museums, and challenges the group to come up with other creative, productive approaches that are inherent to the strengths of their institutions.

We plan to review several types of crowd sourced projects, such as those in which:

1. people create/provide a unique artwork, photo, comment or piece of writing to contribute to a single larger whole:

2. People collectively re-use materials:

  • Natalie Jeremijenko’s feral robot dog project where she teaches people in workshops to hack disposed-of robot pets and turn them into environmental toxin sniffers, where they then create toxin maps of their local environments: www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/

3. People contribute skills, expertise and time,

4. People contribute to citizen science projects

5. People actively collect data for public use:

6. People using public data to create useful maps and tools, as in:

As a result of the conversation on mining the wisdom of the crowd, we could also do just that within our own community. We could consider setting up a crowdsourced research/resource project where people could contribute recommendations of successful projects or ideas for projects!

Links to projects shown on slides

Link to notes about the conversation in the session.

Session Info
Type: Unconference session
Keywords: crowdsourcing, community, creativity, social networking, user generated content
Relevance: Curators, Digital Media or Interpretive Technology staff, Marketing & PR. The relevance lies in the concept of crowd sourced projects to help museums build community, be places or provide content that people use, not just visit (to borrow a term from Nina Simon!)

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