Come Together..."R3" Media Response

Notes on "R3" Media:

"What is Crowdsourcing?"

• Daily Crowdsource
• Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.
• Famous Example: Wikipedia. 
• Crowdsourcing & Quality: The principle of crowdsourcing is that more heads are better than one. By canvassing a large crowd of people for ideas, skills, or participation, the quality of content and idea generation will be superior.
• Different Types of Crowdsourcing:
• Crowdsource Design
• Tell a crowd of designers what you want, how much you will pay, and your deadline
• All interested designers will create a finished design specifically for you. 
• You can keep whichever design you like the best. 
• Increases the quality
• Decreases the price
• Designs for furniture, fashion, advertisements, video, & product design. 
• Just about anything that can be designed can be crowdsourced.
• Crowdfunding
• Asking a crowd of people to donate money to your project. 
• You find a crowdfunding platform, set the goal amount, deadline, and any rewards offered to donors. 
• You must raise 100% of your goal before the deadline, or all the donations are returned to the donors. 
• I.e. Gofundme, kickstarter, etc.
• Crowdfunding is mostly used by artists, charities, & start-ups to raise money for projects such as filming a documentary, manufacturing an iPod watch, cancer research, or seed money.
• Microtasks
• Breaking work up into tiny tasks and sending the work to a crowd of people. 
• Break up the work and decide the payment for each completed task
•  You can expect to see results within minutes. 
• Microtasking can involve tasks such as scanning images, proofreading, database correction and transcribing audio files.
• Work is done faster, cheaper, and usually with less errors
• Additionally, microtasks can often be performed by people in less fortunate countries
• Open Innovation
• "Open innovation allows people from all aspects of business such as investors, designers, inventors, and marketers to collaborate into a functional profit making reality. 
• This can be done either through a dedicated web platform to gain outside perspective, or used with only internal employees.
• Open innovation brings together people from different parts of the world and different sectors of business to work together on a project. 
• This is effectively a collection of different fields and levels of expertise that would not otherwise be available to any budding entrepreneur. 
• It also elevates previously considered uninvolved parties, such as investors, to roll up their sleeves and impart their knowledge, essentially becoming more than just a cash cow."
• Pros:
• The ability to receive better quality results, since several people offer their best ideas, skills, & support. 
• Crowdsourcing allows you to select the best result from a sea of ‘best entries,’ as opposed to receiving the best entry from a single provider. 
• Results can be delivered much quicker than traditional methods, since crowdsourcing is a form of freelancing. 
• You can get a finished video within a month, a finished design or idea within a week, and microtasks appear within minutes.
• Cons: 
• Clear instructions are essential in crowdsourcing. 
• You could potentially be searching through thousands of possible ideas, which can be painstaking, or even complicated, if the instructions are not clearly understood. 
• Some forms of crowdsourcing do involve spec work, which some people are against.
• Quality can be difficult to judge if proper expectations are not clearly stated.

"Jimmy Wales: The Birth of Wikipedia"

• TED
• 1962, Charles Van Doren, (senior editor of Britannica) said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe. 
•  imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
• funded by donations from the public
• Costs very little to run Wikipedia 
• Over 600,000 articles in English 
• 2 million total articles across many different languages 
• Truly global 
• Yochai 
• freely licensed encyclopedia
• It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages
• It's written using Wiki software - so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. 
• Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, 
• Nonprofit organization 
• Founded by Jimmy Wales
• Our goal: the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. 
• It means a lot more than just building a cool website. 
• We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions.
• A lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet
• "And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model
• because that empowers local entrepreneurs -- or anyone who wants to, can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it and you can do it commercially or non-commercially"
• All the editing is done by volunteers. 
• And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine.
• "People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?" or "Who does that?" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in." 
• It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. 
• We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. 
• These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. 
• "You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia."
• And everything is managed by the volunteers. 
• And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about $5,000 (main cost)
• Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy: 
• The media has covered this somewhat extensively. 
• It started out with an article in Red Herring. 
• The articles were edited quite heavily. 
• And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. 
• Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004." 
• This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there.
• In summary, not really a controversy in reality 
• Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. 
• The real struggle is not between the right and the left - that's where most people assume -but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. 
• Elements:
• Mostly social policies  
• Some elements of the software
• Biggest and the most important thing: neutral point-of-view policy. 
• A core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. 
• It's a social concept of cooperation
• The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. 
• Neutrality: any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. 
• We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. 
• Very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. 
• Someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change.
• 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. 
• Very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. 
• The tools and the software: 
• There's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. 
• You can see changes immediately 
• We leave everything very open-ended. 
• There's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. 
• Rick Kay is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxesand votes for deletion. 
• We try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral. 
• There's a certain amount of aristocracy. 
• Jimmy Wales: "benevolent dictator" - "I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world."
• A need still for a certain amount of monarchy
• "That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our opennessand freedom to undermine the quality of the content. And so as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me."
• "I can't tell anyone what to do."
• So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, 
• it's important to understand that our Wiki model is the way we work:
• we're very flexible about the social methodology
• it's ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work
• not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.
• A lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia.
• There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. 
• It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. 
• And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia
• Academics hate it and teachers hate Wikipedia
• But I think there's going to be huge impacts. And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the 
• Wiki books project: an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. 
• 20 years or so  
• Our mission: giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. 
• A tool that they can use
• Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

"The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto"

• April 20, 2013
• Director Tiffany Shlain 
• Keynote address 
• Tribeca Film Festival’s Interactive Day
• Cloudsourcing Creativity and Giving Back in the Age of Collaboration
• Tiffany Shlain 
• Remixing and recontextualizing images
• Filmmaker
• Director
• Filmmaking style of remixing came out of necessity 
• Film theory student ant UC Berkeley in the early 1990's 
• No film production facilities 
• "The idea of recontextualizing images from different eras to express larger ideas about modern times was very exciting to me."
• Archival aesthetic is the foundation of filmmaking style 
• Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death, & Technology: comprised of a combination of archival images from many eras sewn together with new original animations
• "My attempt to understand our world, where we came form, and where we're headed." 
• The new tools and technologies that enable video sharing have allowed me and my team at The Moxie Institute to embark on "cloud filmmaking" 
• Biggest line items: licensing footage and creating animation 
• "It’s an ever growing moveable visual feast of delicacies from all over around the world."
• Let it Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change : 
  a short film series that leverages the creativity of individuals and organizations from across the globe. 
• A Declaration of Interdependence (first film in this series)
• rewrote the U.S. Declaration of Independence 
• July 4, 2011
• "We then asked people through social media either to video themselves reading the script, or to submit artwork that represented ideas in the script."
• Videos and art submissions poured in from all over the world, 
  in all different languages. 
• The experiment was not only working, it was bigger than we imagined.
• "The participatory revolution" 
• 4 minute global mash-up demonstrating the vast potential of creative collaboration in the 21st century
• Example of "the participatory revolution”
• “For centuries we’ve declared our independence. Perhaps it’s now time we declare our interdependence.” 
• In responding to this last line of the film, we launched our foray into Cloud Filmmaking.
• Cloud Filmmaking: 
• Collaborating on the film as one. 
• Working with footage that people shot and sent from all over the world
• We were all invested in seeing the film happen and the final message
• Different way to premiere it
• We decided to do a simultaneous online and live premiere
• Featured by YouTube 
• "It felt like a space-time-cinema shift."
• The film has now been volunteer-translated into 65 languages.
• The next phase of Cloud Filmmaking: giving back. 
• Free customized versions of the film for nonprofits and organizations all over the world. 
• We work with them to craft a custom “call to action” then replace our “call to action” with theirs.
• Now, we are taking Cloud Filmmaking to a mobile app. 
• Connected App
• iPhone, android and iPad 
• Free
• Add even more tools to the collective toolbox of participation for both Connected and the Let it Ripple series
• Built-in recording so that you can participate by contributing to the next film, sharing your stories about using the films or about interdependence, or your ideas on the “participatory revolution.”
• Regularly updated database of research and posts about “connectedness in the 21st century” 
• Information on how to host a screening, 
• Instructions on how to use interactive discussion tools where both the host and the audience can engage with the research, conversation cards, and discussion book before and after the film
• You can also license our Educator’s Edition and receive both printed materials for the class and the mobile app to engage, participate, and give back. 
• The app is yet another way of redefining the relationship between the creator and the receiver. 
• Cloud Filmmaking is about everyone participating.
• Second film in the Let it Ripple series: Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks
• Based on exciting research from Harvard, University of Washington, and UCBerkeley on how to best nurture a young child’s brain. 
• Based on this research, we looked at the parallels between nurturing the growth of the brain and nurturing the growth of the Internet 
• Over the next four years we will make 20 of these short films, evolving the way we collaborate with people and organizations.
• “The Age of Collaboration” : "People around the world are able to share strategies when catastrophe strikes; scientists are opening up problems to gamers to solve previously unsolvable problems, and artists and inventors can gather groups of supporters to help them fund their projects."
• "My team at The Moxie Institute and I are cloudsourcing creativity to tell collaborative, universal stories that can be used by organizations all over the world."
• The possibilities keep expanding for people to tell their stories. I love when Apple added a second camera to the front of the phone so people can now film themselves with ease, removing any mediation between people recording their ideas and stories.
• We ultimately are a species of storytellers. 
• This is how we share, empathize and learn. 
• “The Internet and movie makers  have collided, and the result is a cloud film-making revolution.” – Dean Takahashi, Venture Beat