VideoBots and Crowdsourcing
Sourcing video messages from a crowd of people with VideoBot can be supremely fascinating. It’s a little like crowdsourcing, you never know what you’re going to get, but often, it’s something cool.
Crowdsourcing, as defined by Wikipedia is a term now commonly used for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task. Leveraging collaboration this way can often have interesting results that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
I recently came across a fun example of crowdsourcing: shoe design. Yes, that’s right. Fluevog, the company that makes some very distinctive shoes and with roots in Canada, is running open source footwear. The site reads: “Are you frustrated, not finding the shoes you really want? Is your imagination ahead of the whole shoe industry and you’re sick of waiting for them to catch up? Here’s your chance to go over their heads and deal with someone who actually cares what you want. All that you need is that brilliant idea. Even just for part of a shoe – scribble it down and send it to us. We don’t care if it’s on a bar napkin, as long as we can make it out.”
Similar to the open source software concept, it says, the best ideas get recognized and anyone can contribute. Designs become public domain, so you won’t get rich from getting your shoes chosen, but Fluevog promises to send you a free pair and make you part of their alumni community. Sounds like fun to me. But I’m getting a little off-track. Sometimes that happens with shoes.
With VideoBot, anyone at the event can contribute their message and we don’t filter or tell anyone what to say. The best ideas, while not always subject to peer evaluation or voting, definitely get appreciated nonetheless. We’re learning so much from people and from the experience, that I’ve decided to keep a list of VideoBot “laws” that seem to apply from event to event. My hope is that these observations might be helpful for social information gathering or just for discussion.
Here’s my first observation:
Regardless of quantity of contributions- there is always at least one quality contribution that makes it all worthwhile.
Though “worthwhile” is subjective, I think I can safely say it for my purposes here. Often, it’s a completely surprising contribution. Case in point: VideoBot at MESH 2008. While we recorded lots of great messages from the conference attendees, including entrepreneurs, social media savvy folk, and conference speakers – I can’t say there were huge numbers of videos. Regardless of quantity, we got one that is definitely quality.
That’s filmmaker Rob Spence. He’s a great guy and if you want to see more, do check out the Eyeborg Project: The future is now – a one-eyed filmmaker gets camera-eye. He was recently featured on the Today show. Remember, EventBots caught it first. (Ok, I’ll have to ask Rob if that’s actually true.)
Would love to know if you’ve observed anything similar in your experience.
