Page 22 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014been called “open innovation”: to open up the processes of internal decision‐making, product design or problem‐solving so that it is a community of participants who contribute a diversity of ideas, knowledge and visions to help achieve the company’s objectives. The experience of the Lego groups, the Lilly pharmaceutical communities or the designs of Opel, IBM and Ikea supply the most popular examples that typify the most basic crowdsourcing: maximise the involvement of the customer at various points in the value chain of the company’s processes.TYPES OF CROWDSOURCINGCrowdsourcing is broad enough and flexible enough to inspire and harbour a great many experiments that have adopted new forms to resolve concrete problems. This practice takes from Web 2.0 the involvement of cooperation and participation by the users in multiple aspects of the processes of production and distribution of knowledge in which they are involved. These processes vary in scope: from the conclusion of the acceptance process (crowdvoting) to the intermediate production process (crowdcreating), to the origin of the idea itself (crowdwisdom) or financial sustainability (crowdfunding).In their book Manifiesto Crowd, Juan Freire and Antonio Gutiérrez Rubí extend this classification and identify several other settings in which to the key factor of “crowd” (“crowd” being “multitude” rather than “mass”) is added the cooperative spirit. The authors distinguish this constellation of crowd manifestations on a matrix according to whether collaboration occurs fundamentally to create or produce the project (crowdthinking, crowdcreating and crowdworking) or whether it is to fund it or market it (crowdfunding, crowdplanning, crowdcuration, crowdvoting and crowdbuying).At this point it is worth observing that crowdsourcing is not a synonym for any collective practice. At a basic level, we could say that the simple voting of videos on YouTube, which is certainly the outcome of an action by multiple usersAC/Ewho generate a certain knowledge through their aggregated actions, is not an instance of crowdsourcing in the strict sense, since it lacks the following characteristics:1. Planning or direction by a group, company or institution with the aim of obtaining certain results through the cooperation of a large number of users.2. The existence of a group or potential community of users with a certain willingness to take part.3. That there be a distribution of tasks so that participants can deal with some part of them in a conscious and deliberate way.4. That there be a desired calendar of work, with a beginning and an end. Hence also it is common to talk about crowdsourcing “campaigns” or “projects”.5. That the greater resulting benefit redounds fundamentally to the goal planned in advance by the group, person, company or institution that launches the crowdsourcing project.Although not essential, it is usual that the system of recompense, profit or payment for participants is clearly defined from the start. These may take a variety of forms: material, with a financial return; or intangible, such as social reputation, personal achievement, learning, etc.CROWDSOURCING IN ART AND CULTUREAlthough crowdsourcing is largely known thanks to big companies, the essence of participation by users and amateurs, in terms of open, distributed collaboration, is found in many other sectors of society: ranging from science, with distributed genome research, to politics, such as the Obama campaign in 2008, or the public activism of the 15‐M Movement or the “opendata” journalism of Wikileaks.WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 2: CROWDSOURCING: SHARED CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...22