Crowd Sourcing: the Benefits of Micro-Democracy
Crowdsourcing in 8 easy steps (from wikipedia.org article)
Crowd Sourcing is the mob mentality turned on it’s head. Where a mob can escalate a bad idea into a horrible one, Crowd Sourcing has the benefit of getting an “average” from more people and therefore getting closer to an answer that is right for more people.
This has the radical possiblity of decentralizing the idea of authority and reestablishing demoracy in many, small ways. The threat of abuse or misuse of Crowd Sourcing is not something that I have the expertise to discuss on this blog, but please take a minute to follow down the rabbit hole that is the internet and see what you can find.
Simple examples of crowd sourcing working for you:
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Needle in a Haystack 2
Many people lose cameras every day. With digital camera’s you can easily upload a few of the picture and pass them around the internet until eventually someone recognizes the pictures and can then claim ownership of the camera. Needle in a Haystack and a NiaH inspired project called Needle in a Haystack 2 which is fueled by Facebook
- The Library of Congress asked people to visit their Flickr page and help them to identify unlabeled pictures from their archive. Within a few days, all of them had been identified.
- Although the “voting” process is closed, the Environmental Protection Agency is soliciting ideas of how to best spend the government money to clean up the environment. Either submit an idea or vote for an idea that someone else posted. OpenEPA
- Citizen Science. Getting empowered and impassioned volunteers to help collect data across vast areas to increase the reach and scope of research.
