Posts Tagged ‘Crowdsourcing’

Crowdsourcing With Kluster

No Comments » Written on February 28th, 2008 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Productivity

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I came across a site this morning called Kluster:

kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get stuff done. everyone has ideas, we provide a platform to get them out of heads and into the world…where they belong.

Source: Kluster

Crowdsourcing refers to outsourcing a task to a large group of undefined people often in the form of an open call to participate. For example, author Timothy Ferriss has put out an open invitation to edit his best selling The 4-Hour Workweek in preparation for the next edition of the book.

Kluster seems like an innovative way to enable and formalize the crowdsourcing process. It would appear to work like this:

  • You post an idea (for example a product idea, an event, a design task) and a reward.
  • The idea, called a project, gets broken down into phases which represent smaller manageable deliverables.
  • The community proposes solutions for each phase. These proposed solutions can be critiqued, improved and refined by others in the crowd.
  • The community can invest in the various solutions (like a stock market of solution candidates).

Kluster then uses an advanced decision making algorithm to determine the best solution in each phase:

Rather then just choosing the most popular item, kluster uses advanced algorithms to make decisions. All the activity and participation on kluster is stored and analyzed. The data is used in the decision-making process. Each user's successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history are considered. This encourages users to earn respect, to act positively, and most importantly, enables extremely educated decisions to be made using real world logic.

Source: Kluster

The reward gets paid out according to who invested in the winning solutions. By formalizing and facilitating the crowdsourcing process, Kluster could allow you to have one more rather interesting outsourcing option. Check out the Kluster tour:

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve Been Asked To Edit The 4-Hour Workweek!

1 Comment » Written on February 20th, 2008 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Personal Development

Yes, it's true. Author Tim Ferriss has invited me to edit his best selling book The 4-Hour Workweek. Here's the thing: he has basically extended this invitation to everyone! For those who wish to contribute, Ferriss is collecting ideas via an open wiki for the next edition of the book:

I want an improved and expanded 4HWW to help propel the critical mass needed for large-scale institutional, and even policy-level, change. The book alone won’t do it, obviously, but I believe it can play a small part as instigator.

Source: The Blog of Tim Ferriss.

I think this is an interesting strategy. A lot of people (including myself obviously) have been inspired by the ideas behind the book and have made new innovations in lifestyle design using the book as a starting point. As Ferriss says: "we" is smarter than "me".

Ferriss goes on to say:

To my knowledge, this is the first time a NY Times bestseller has ever been made open to public editing. In fact, I haven’t seen any traditionally-published book ever crowdsourced on a global scale.

Source: The Blog of Time Ferriss.

Well, I am not so sure about that. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, the authors of the best selling Naked Conversations, put chapters of their book on their blog for review. In essence, that book (or at least a good portion of it) was edited by the blogosphere. I believe there are other examples (as far as I know Producing Open Source Software was - fittingly - reviewed by many online before being published). By the way, I highly recommend both of these books, although the later will probably most interest those who work in the software industry.

Anyway, here is your chance to leave your mark on the book that started it all while Ferriss gets his book updated and fact checked virtually for free - which is cool - after all crowdsouring is just another version of outsourcing!

Popularity: 2% [?]