Letting the crowd grope you...

While I don't recommend letting the crowd grope you (unless you are into that), Fleshmap investigated the online equivalent by looking at the collective perception of erogenous zones. They used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to ask hundreds of people to rank how good it would feel to touch a lover's private parts and plotted the results as a heatmap (image right). The result is not surprising, but I always like good examples of crowdsourced input that confirm for us what we already know.

Coalition of the Willing: Animation for the planet

Here's a fine example of distributed movie-making toward a greater good. Coalition of the Willing is an online animated video that is being constructed now through April 2010 by a small army of creative collaborators from around the globe.

‘Coalition of The Willing’ is a film that discusses how we can use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analyses of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to bring the fight against global warming to the people. As the film tackles the subject of online activism, we decided that the logical home for ‘Coalition of The Willing’ is here online.

One section of the work in progress from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

The script was co-written by philosopher/writer/filmmaker Tim Rayner and artist Simon Robson of Knife Party (an animation collective). Viewers can watch the collaborative process online, from script to storyboards to production, via the project website and a variety of social media platforms. In this instance, the mission of the project is issue-driven, and a certain level of proficiency exists because the participants were hand-picked rather than randomly sourced.

Snowmageddon

Having grown up in the Boston area, I've chuckled to myself a few times after hearing about Washington DC getting a dusting of snow that renders the city helpless. Now they've had a very real storm, and they're working to get back on their feet. Having been caught mostly unprepared, and with an infrastructure that seems to be lacking in the snow-response department, the people are taking action.

Armed with an online tool, Snowmageddon Clean-up, some snowed-in and stranded folks are seeking help. Sponsored by The Washington Post and PICnet, the website lets visitors post shovel requests, icy street warnings, and other storm-related info. There seems to be a system in place to verify the posts, which while subjective, is probably a good thing. That way the site can stay focused on shoveling parties, community-building and information-sharing. It's a little like a super-specific, less creepy Craigslist. So with this verification system implemented, how did the "My Boyfriend is Driving me Crazy" post get through?

"Right now my 24-year-old boyfriend is flapping his arms, proclaiming "I'm the Mothman!" (He's watching Monsterquest) I hope this illustrates why we both need to get out of the apartment. Somebody please melt all the snow."

Now, I'm no square, I think this is hilarious. But really, why is it there? It's the tipping point. Will this site turn into a geo-twitter, where we can see exactly where people have run out of tea? I would argue that this is one instance in which a strong gate-keeper is really vital. Or am I the curmudgeon who won't tolerate a joke? Also here's this, which is just bizarre - Snowpocalypse

Ten Thousand Cents

San Francisco media artist Takashi Kawashima has been exploring crowdsourced art for a few years, now.

For example, Takashi's 2005 project "The King Has...", a collaboration with Krister Olsson, invited people to text the artist(s) their most burdensome secrets; these secrets were then posted (anonymously) in a public place. Video below:

The King Has... from Takashi Kawashima on Vimeo.

Between November 2007 and March 2008, Takashi collaborated with Aaron Koblin on "Ten Thousand Cents," a "coordinated, crowdsourced [digital] art project" created by several thousand individuals using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service — a crowdsourcing marketplace, publicly launched in 2005, that enables computer programs to coordinate the use of human intelligence — and a customized Flash-based drawing software.

Koblin and Takashi divided a high-res scan of the $100 bill into 10,000 equal parts, each of which was delivered to a "turker" who was paid a penny to duplicate it using the drawing tool. Contributors (who hailed from 51 different countries) didn't have any idea of the whole picture. The project took 5 months to complete; the idea was to use 10,000 turkers, but some turkers participated more than once. The end result was a reproduction of a $100 bill that cost $100 to create. Video:

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

There's a neat interface here that lets you watch any one of the 10,000 Flash paintings being created. "Ten Thousand Cents" was a finalist (Experimental category) for a SXSW Web Award in 2009.

More recently, Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey collaborated on "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" (great title), which used Amazon Mechanical Turk to record 2,088 sound clips. Turkers were sent a short-short sound clip — snipped from a mechanical-speech version of the 1892 song "Daisy Bell" — and asked to imitate what they heard, using a custom audio recording tool in a web browser. They were not given additional information. People from 71 countries participated; they were paid six cents apiece. Stitched back together, the clips sound like this:

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Why a mechanical-speech version of "Daisy Bell"? Because the song was used, in 1962, as the first example of musical speech synthesis. (That's also why HAL sings it, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

What's Wappening!?

Yesterday I received a curious message from artist Lee Walton.

"At this very moment, a man is locked up to a park bench at Union Square Park in San Francisco. To unlock him, find the woman in the red scarf at the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She is the only one who has the combination to the lock. She will give it to you. Can you find a way to set this man free? He is hungry and wants to go home."

This is the fourth in a series of "Wappenings" (2004-ongoing) created by Walton to see how fast, creative, and cooperative social networks really are. The first three Wappenings also had a challenge built into the plea, with a stranger awaiting relief from a predicament. For instance, a man stands unable to put on his coat, despite freezing weather, until a stranger gives him an orange; or a young (attractive, single, bookish) woman is scheduled to drop her books and papers down the steps of New York Public Library at noon, will someone be there to assist her?). These requests are posted on Walton's website and circulated voluntarily by the usual social networking platforms, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

How long did it take for the stranger to be freed from his park bench prison? According to Walton:

"It took about 2 hours to unlock the guy. Apparently, the manager at the cafe got a handful of calls asking to speak to a girl wearing a red scarf. He wouldn't help out of respect for his customers. Finally, Katrina (from SF) sent a FAX. Yes, in 2010 a fax solves the communication riddle. She got the combo and unlocked Lucas. It was starting to rain even harder..."

Crowdsourcing's Baby Daddy, Jeff Howe

Jeff Howe, the man who coined the term "crowdsourcing" with Chris Anderson in 2006, has created a series of "how(e) to crowdsource" videos for American Express' Open Forum (itself a kind of online collaborative platform for small businesses). Here are Howe's five tips.

#1: Pick the right crowd

#2: Pick the right incentive

#3: Keep it simple

#4: Keep the pink slips in the drawer (i.e., don't expect to save money)

#5: Ask what you can do for the crowd

These tips are posted on a major credit card's website. Which begs the question: has crowdsourcing been so co-opted by corporations that its potential has been stunted? The first instances of crowdsourcing (distributed computing) typically involved solving a complex problem (mapping the human genome, searching for extraterrestrial life) that had an impact on humanity. I'm not sure that a crowd-generated commercial for Heinz Ketchup can do the same.

Markets and collaborative pricing

In some ways, markets can be thought of as crowdsourced input. While it is perhaps a bit of a stretch to claim that markets facilitate indirect collaboration, a nice example of what I mean is illustrated with the project "One Thousand Paintings".

onethousandpaintings.com is an art experiment that explores the role of crowdsourced input in valuation of art. The project is the brainchild of Swiss artist/Stanford evolutionary biologist Marcel Salathe whose other projects include "Webpages as graphs", "Salathe & White - Art Bond Project". The basic premise behind this experiment is that there is a tremendous uncertainty in the value of artwork. A prominent example of this was illustrated in 2003 when 24 paintings thought to be authentic Jackson Pollocks were discovered. Determining their authenticity, or lack thereof, modifies their value by hundreds of millions of dollars.

So the question behind onethousandpaintings.com is: What if you let the crowd, mediated by the market, determine the value of the art? While you may argue that this is nothing more than supply/demand economics, onethousandpaitings takes it to an entirely new level by incentivizing early adopters with what has been likened to a mashup of "eBay with a pyramid scheme".

The price = 1000 - number on the painting. The first 100 paintings are discounted by 90%, with a 10% decrease in the discount every time 100 paintings are sold. So, for example, painting 50 should cost $950 (1000-50). However if you are one of the first one hundred people to purchase, you get it at the fire sale price of $95. The "indirect collaboration" comes into play when you consider that the value of your painting increases only when others, your collaborators, purchase more paintings.

I'm not sure whether or not this meets the criterion of crowdsourced input on the creative process, but it is surely a nice way to think about markets. Full disclosure, I am the proud owner of 626.