The Promise of Crowdsourcing

Today I came across the work of Mike Krieger and Yan Yan Wang at Stanford's HCI Lab in which they studied the efficacy of certain online brainstorming techniques.  Their research focused on comparison of idea generation tools to see if, through tool adaptations, it was possible to increase participation in expanding and improving ideas while overcoming the problems of too many ideas, not enough idea collaboration that are typical of brainstorming on discussion forums.  Part of their research revealed some great lessons from crowd sourcing endeavors on the Internet which Mike has shared in these slides posted on Slideshare.

Crowds and Creativity

View SlideShare presentation

The most valuable, and I think uniquely insightful advice he gives are the 9 guidelines for successful crowd sourcing online:

1. When diversity matters
2. Small chunks/ delegate-able actions
3. Easy verification
4. Fun activity, or hidden ambition
5. Better than computers at performing a task
6. Learn from hacks, mods, re-use from crowd
7. Enable novel knowledge discovery 
8. Maintain vision & design consistency
9. Not just about lower costs

I see these tips as not only useful to the aspiring wiki-ist, but also to users of Mechanical Turk, which happens to be a tool that was instrumental in their Ideas2Ideas study.  I'm looking forward to applying these guidelines and the design principles behind Ideas2Ideas to future crowd sourcing endeavors.