Crowdsourcing and Gift Economies

Submitted by emmajane on October 11, 2008 - 8:31pm

Explaining open source is sometimes a little tricky. (Only sometimes though. Honest.) Depending on who I'm talking to I'll explain that working on an open source project is a little bit like volunteering to sing with the church choir. Even if the person isn't religious, they can usually appreciate the beauty of a group that sings in unison. They also understand the more the choir practices together, the better they sound. On more than one occasion this explanation has been the "aha" moment that snaps my life and my business ethics into focus for a friend or a client. The analogy doesn't, however, work when trying to explain crowd sourcing.

I am working on a new project that will offer (free) audio interviews with community "elders." The audio interviews will have transcripts and will need to be translated into multiple languages. I've convinced the project lead to turn to the internets and use crowd sourcing to make these translations happen. On the one hand they may not be perfect, and they may not all happen instantly, on the other hand I think it would be an amazing school project for someone that is learning a second language...to translate part of the audio interview and to help spread the cultural knowledge from one community to another.

The project lead is skeptical about this whole "people will work for free" thing. She's asked me to find some more reading material on crowdsourcing and gift economies to get a better understanding of what it's all about (and why we do it and why it makes perfect business sense). I have to admit that I know it works more based on my gut than because of specific research. I've found the following articles with a quick google search. Do you know of more? Please leave your suggestions in the comments!

(Yes, I'm pretty sure this is me crowdsourcing my crowdsourcing research. The irony is not lost on me.)

I also want to open up the real can of worms: licensing. If you were doing this kind of project, how would you license the content on the site? Would you use different licenses for the "primary source" material and the contributed translations?

Comments

October 11, 2008 - 10:22pm

Bryan Quigley

Perhaps this might be of help http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BossaIntro

Also.. Launchpad Translations https://translations.launchpad.net/
Really good example to show project lead.

October 12, 2008 - 1:41am

Mike Charlton

Not an article about crowdsourcing, but perhaps some examples of community translation would be helpful. The world of Japanese manga (comic books) and anime (cartoons) is full of these types of translations.

This site: http://www.mangajouhou.com/ contains a list of manga that has been translated (for free) by community volunteers.

This site: http://www.animesuki.com/ contains a list of anime that has been translated.

The lists are rather huge and show that hundreds of people will work on a project like this with no monetary compensation. It should be noted that translation between Japanese and English is something of a rare skill, so I consider this to be relevant to what you are doing. However, since the translation is tiresome it has to be something you are passionate about. Probably (from what I can guess of) your project would qualify.

Licensing is important. Clearly the people making the comments will need to have final say on what is done with what they say/write. However, you can make suggestions. I suggest CC attribution, share-alike as being relatively easy to sell and useful to you. Note that you must not use "no-derivatives" unless you get a special waver for translations, because the translations are themselves derivatives.

When you ask for something for free, I think it is important that the author's feelings are kept in mind. Probably you *could* demand "ownership" of the comments and translations, but you would eventually create bad feelings that would sink your endeavour. Instead try to keep it as unencumbered as possible while keeping the author's (or translator's) well being in mind.

November 6, 2008 - 3:35am

Neil Greenwood

Directly related to podcasts (and Ubuntu), there's the Ubuntu-UK podcast's transcription project. http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/transcripts/

The team's guide on how to do the transcriptions is here, if you're interested: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PodcastTranscription

October 12, 2008 - 3:10am

heyrocker

I highly highly recommend Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It is all about the weird and magical ways the internet has brought crowds together to do wondrous things. I have this quote from it written in the front of my notebook:

"Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material."

October 13, 2008 - 4:57am

Markus

I can only highly recommend the original Article from Jeff Howe, the creator of the term Crowdsourcing:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Also a very good (but longer) read is the book Wikinomics by Don Tappscott and Anthony D. Williams, which gives you a very good overview and a lot of examples on these new collaboration principles.
Also check out their blog at http://www.wikinomics.com

If you need more material, get back to me by Email. I wrote a thesis on customer participation in the value chain, so I have more material at hand.

Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Markus

November 7, 2008 - 3:51pm

Michael Nielsen

Jeff Howe, who originated the term "Crowdsourcing", has recently released a book titled "Crowdsourcing".

Let me add another vote for Clay Shirky's superb book "Here Comes Everybody", even if it's a bit light on the crowdsourcing.

December 26, 2008 - 4:53pm

Sam Kleinman

I commented more extensively on the subject over yonder , and saw a link to this post.

But to summarize, I think it's at least a little productive to talk about crowd sourcing and open source in the terms of "software freedom" and "data ownership." As I think crowd sourcing is just like open source software, except that developers aren't protected by a license that can (theoretically) guarantee enduring freedoms. Which very often don't have a huge pragmatic effect: crowd source-ers benefit greatly from the efforts of the crowd, and so are disinclined to sabotage the crowd's efforts. At the same time, if the crowd source-er feels like the crowd is impinging upon their business plan, the tables change a bit more.

My company had a project a few months ago that depended on integrations with a website that provided an open API (but was not open source), and we ran into some rather serious and frustrating problems when the API changed rather precipitously. This kind of thing underscores the very concrete value of "real" open source.

In anycase, I've enjoyed this train of thought, and we should totally talk at drupal con.

January 5, 2009 - 10:22am

evden eve nakliye

Very nice article thank you very much...

January 8, 2009 - 11:51am

james

Would Design by Humans or springleap.com be examples of crowdsourcing?

January 11, 2009 - 12:40am

emmajane

Hmm. I'm not familiar with either project. I assume they're like www.Threadless.com? I don't really see these as being crowd sourcing.  Although individual artists are contributing designs, the "crowd" is merely voting on contributions (which is really just an indication of interest in purchasing). I think of crowd sourcing as being more like a potluck dinner where everyone brings a little bit and as a result you end up with a huge feast.

Does that distinction make sense?