“What type of incentive would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?”

Source: http://linkedin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/graph21.jpg?w=502&h=321

The concept of using crowdsourcing to translate content is not new. Facebook, Mozilla and TED have used similar strategies. Ming wrote about Facebook’s translation initiative here.

When first looking at LinkedIn’s effort to utilize crowdsourcing, it appears as though they’ve made the right moves. They engaged their audience, asked for opinions with a survey and acknowledged the importance of incentives when looking to users to make contributions.

There is an interesting factor at play here, though. LinkedIn is known as a professional network. And given that LinkedIn serves this professional purpose, it’s worthy to note that direct financial compensation was left out of the possible responses for the survey question shown above.
As a result, LinkedIn has received a flurry of feedback over the last two weeks, much of it coming from translators themselves voicing their opinions about professionals being compensated fairly. A Twitter hashtag was established (#linkedinfail) and a LinkedIn discussion group was formed (Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses), now with 300+ members.
Here’s a look at some of the comments that have been posted in the past two weeks:

If LinkedIn goes ahead with an open call for translations, they’ll likely attract both professional and amateur translators. The issue then is that a professional and an amateur participate for different reasons. The professional looks for financial compensation, while the amateur seeks out, for example, recognition within the community (ie. “You’re the #1 translator of [ language name] based on submitting [x number of translations]“).
That becomes interesting because one of those deals – the amateur – is a much better one for LinkedIn (provided they put in place a system to ensure some standard of quality in translation).
So, if you’re a translator – which side are you on? Is this an opportunity to contribute to a community and gain valuable experience? Or, as some have questioned, is this the exploitation of professionals?
You might also be interested in “Is Spec Work Evil?”

At noon yesterday, the Sunlight Foundation announced the winners from the Apps for America contest.  The top prize (which came with a $15 000 reward) went to the makers of Filibusted.us, a web-based application that sheds light on which Senators have been filibustering legislation in the US Senate.  There were 16 prize winners in total, and I definately recommend checking out the winners for yourself (my favorite is Legistalker.org).

Next came the recently-launched INCA – the Innovative and Creative Application Contest, based out of Belgium.  This contest is open for anyone to submit an application, be it a website, widget, google mashup or mobile application, to be used by Flemish citizens to help solve “collective and social problems.”  Prizes will be awarded to the ten best submissions, with the top developer receiving a prize of 20 000 Euros (about $25 ooo USD).  Deadline for submission is April 27th. 

With INCA, Apps for America and last November’s Apps for Democracy, we’re starting to see a very exciting trend in the Gov 2.0 space:  software developers and programmers engaging in social causes and public sector development.  Can these contests help spur the creation of new services along the lines of fixmystreet or transparency tools like opencongress?  After speaking with Sunlight’s John Wonderlich and Apps for Democracy architect Peter Corbett over the past two weeks, I’m convinced that they can.

The key to improving on these contest models is to create, in the words of Peter Corbett, a “Cradle-to-Grave” strategy to promote citizen-driven innovation in the public sector.  Corbett’s Cradle-to-Grave approach seeks an 8-step process for future application contests:

1.  Problem Sourcing:  Idea-sourcing, in this case, will work best when a specific problem/social issue is being targeted (such as crime, traffic congestions, etc.)

2.  Open Data:  A key to the success of Apps for Democracy was that Vivek Kundra made DC’s government data openly available with over 240 data feeds. 

3.  Government Sponsorship:  To support the idea-sourcing contest.  This was done in DC’s Apps initiative.

4.  Establish Contest Framework: Well-constructed in all three above examples.

5.  Launch and Run the Contest:  Also well-done in the three above-cited cases.

6.  Award:  All three contests had multiple award winners (not just financial – the recognition is probably a more powerful incentive to participation).

7.  Absorption by Government:  For the best applications to live on after the contest and provide real value to the public sector, they need to be adopted, maintained, and ideally, improved upon.  This represents a murky point, and an area where the initial contests haven’t found a working model.  It’s unclear how this is best handled.  Should the government provide ongoing grants for development of applications?  Should government internalize the best applications?

8.  Commercialization:  Lastly, Corbett believes that the applications need to somehow become commercialized, although it’s unclear whether or not government should be involved.  Could iLive.at or DCHistoricTours have a business model, wherein they could be licensed to other cities to use?  Another possibility might be a sponsorship arrangement with a private company.

Overall, citizen-driven idea sourcing and app creation represents a means of maximizing web 2.0 potential in public sector development.  The room for improvement is massive – outside of DC, for example, very few governments have truly open data (Corbett’s 2nd step).  But even if we’re still years away from widespread adoption of this model, at least we have the model (or rather, a model), with forward-thinking governments seeing the merits and beginning to move in this direction. 

If you’re really into this space, there’s a major development coming over the horizon – but that’s a whole other blog post in itself.

Denis used crowdSPRING to design the logo for his chTONGUEeek website, and discussed his experience with them in this blog.  For his purposes, crowdSPRING was great – he received 69 logo submissions, the opportunity to collaborate with the designer whose proposal he liked the best, and of course, got the logo he needed.   All for $150.

So, this brings us to the issue up for debate among the SXSW panelists (in the video below).   Does spec work (in creative) devalue an industry of designers?

From the perspective of workers within the industry, it’s not surprising that established designers and creative firms would be opposed to spec work;  one panelist discussed a possible industry blacklisting of workers who engage on sites like crowdSPRING.  For more on this perspective, see the NO!SPEC website, where you can read their “Ten Reasons” against spec work, or the article Why Speculation Hurts.

On the flip side, there’s a good argument to be made that sites like crowdspring tear down barriers and facilitate entry into the profession for the young workers looking to build a resume.  As an aspiring young designer, it can be hard to build a professional resume and get your first job (this applies to most professions).  To these workers, there could be a lot of value in gaining experience through crowdspring (and other spec sites).

The panel at SXSW did a great job covering the issues of spec work in design and creative.  But what if we apply this spec work model to other industries?

One of the best perspectives on this issue came from Alan Majer, citing a great example of a family member who works in the medical profession.  Alan’s analogy actually surrounded the provision of a government grant, where $100 000 of funding was available to a company that placed the “best bid” on a given assignment – a fairly common process.  His family member (and her team) put in about a week’s worth of time working on this project.  But so did 50-100 other teams that also submitted bids, meaning that, theoretically, anywhere from 49-99 teams used up about a week’s worth of work for nothing.  If you aggregate the whole process, there was a lot of work put in (with people “dropping their day jobs”) for what amounts out to very little money.

This raises questions about sites like Innocentive, a company that generally gets very good press (in Wikinomics, in the news, and of course, in the blogosphere).  Innocentive is a great way to find innovations, and is an excellent example of how companies can use external collaboration for R&D.  But from a broader economic perspective, could Innocentive also be somewhat damaging to the science industry?  In many cases, Innocentive works well because it connects company X working on project Y with a scientist elsewhere in the world who, unbeknownst to them, has also been working on project Y; a win-win.  But what if Innocentive were promoting spec work?  If a $1 000 000 award is offered to a scientist who can solve a specific problem, and 2000+ scientists worldwide drop their current projects to spend two weeks working on it, doesn’t this seem problematic, in terms of lost production?

I would argue that in the first example (connecting Y with Y), Innocentive is fantastic.  But if it (or sites like it) start drawing too many workers away from their real value-adding jobs, as with Alan’s example above, then it probably is damaging, on an aggregate economic level. 

So is spec work evil?  For logo design on a site like chTONGUEeek, probably not.  But if this model was applied to other industries, it could certainly be damaging. 

One thing I’m willing to bet – we’re likely to see an increase in the use of spec work as more people catch on to Web 2.0, and also as individuals and companies look to cut costs in the new economy.

In the original Galaxy Zoo nearly 150,000 citizen scientists helped astronomers at Oxford and Yale classify roughly 1 million galaxies imaged by the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the researchers anticipated that it might take at least two years to complete the project. But within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were submitted during the first year.

In Galaxy Zoo 2 contributors have been equipped with more powerful classification tools and assigned more complex tasks than before, giving the researchers an even richer data set to work with. Project leads are hoping Zoo 2 will produce as much science – and as many surprises – as the original Galaxy Zoo did. My hunch is that it will likely generate much more.

For examples of the what the citizen scientists are up to see the results of their beta tests here. You can also follow the project on twitter.

Dan Borge: Director, LECG, a global expert services and consulting firm. Former senior managing director and head of corporate strategy at Bankers Trust where he was the principal designer of RAROC, the first enterprise risk management system. Author of the Book of Risk.

John Hull, Maple Financial Group Chair in Derivatives and Risk Management, Professor of Finance and Co-Director, Master of Finance Program, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto

Robert (Bob) Tapscott, interim CEO, RISConsulting

Moderator: Chuck Bralver, Senior Associate Dean – International Business and Finance, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (former Partner and Vice Chair, Oliver, Wyman & Company)

Chair: Don Tapscott, Chair, nGenera Insight and Adjunct Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto

Highlights:

Dan Borge:  “Risk management came off the track in part because it became so technical with sophisticated analytics that got ahead of risk management knowledge and basic human judgment.  The result was that opacity became a huge part of the financial system.

“The industry was infected with perverse incentives.  For example, you had mortgage originators with no stake in the outcome.  There were no incentives to ensure the viability of mortgages, and everyone ended up fooling themselves.

“In the summer of 2007, Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince told the Financial Times that he was aware of the risks Citigroup was taking:  ‘When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.’  Well, the music has stopped.”

Dan Borge answers questions U of T Rotman School of Management session on Risk Management 2.0

John Hull:  “We saw too many people with the wrong incentives. They thought ‘well, we all know that something is wrong but nothing is going to change this year, so I’ll play the game until I get my bonus.’  The system and products became too opaque, complex and exotic to understand.”

Bob Tapscott:  “Numerous attempts to restart the engine, and they’ve all been unsuccessful. To establish trust and stability the banks need a very different model – something dramatic will have to change.  Tinkering will not solve the problem.  Government throwing money at the problem is not working to restore confidence in the system.  We need a global forensic exercise to open up the entire financial services industry.  This will take leadership and requires radical thinking, baking transparency into the system, and sharing of intellectual property, such as placing algorithms into the public domain.”

Bob Tapscott answers questions U of T Rotman School of Management session on Risk Management 2.0

Don Tapscott:  “The incentives to the industry were toxic, akin to a bacteria. A cultural change is required to achieve a healthy system.  Transparency is required to purge the system of inappropriate incentives and behavior.  It’s never been more true that sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

According to Bob Tapscott, fresh capital and updated regulations are necessary but insufficient to restore confidence. Bankers and business leaders should embrace a comprehensive private sector solution entitled Wiki Risk Assessment Process (WRAP 2.0).  The proposal would rethink the basic modus operandi of the financial services marketplace and create a new operating model.

“The Wiki Risk Assessment Process creates a global community of expert modelers and modeling resources dedicated to unlocking today’s credit and structured asset markets.  This would be achieved through an open, transparent and collaborative process for valuing and risk-assessing non-government credit securities and related instruments and contracts such as CDOs and credit derivatives,” said Bob Tapscott.  ”By tapping the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’, WRAP 2.0 would introduce transparency and peering to value and risk measurement benchmarking.  It will invite all of the best valuation modeling minds to collaborate in the process. This would contribute significantly to restoring confidence and liquidity in the world’s credit markets.”

Bob Tapscott referred the audience to www.WRAP20.com for more details concerning his proposal.

HNIC used to be North America’s sole source for televised hockey games. For Canadians in particular, Saturday was synonomous with one thing: HNIC on CBC. But for years, fans have been asking, “What’s so special about Saturday night?” After all, basic cable broadcasts 2-3 games a week, and if you’re still looking for more, you can purchase the NHL Network (or a team-specific channel like LeafsTV), and watch hockey 7 nights a week. CBC clearly faces a challenge in maintaining the popularity of HNIC. So how exactly are they promoting their product?

As Andrea Bettello wrote here, many fans were outraged when the CBC sold the rights to the HNIC theme song in 2008 (for anyone outside of Canada, the HNIC theme song probably rivals ‘O Canada’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ as the tune most widely recognized by Canadians). But maybe CBC was on to something. After selling the theme song, they held a contest asking Canadians to write the new HNIC theme song, actively engaging thousands of fans in the process. But surely there are further steps CBC could take to engage and retain viewers. (Obviously they have taken such steps or this post would never have been written).

When I sat down to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs get beat by the Philadelphia Flyers on HNIC last Saturday night I wasn’t expecting any Wikinomics-related content from the CBC. But then I was struck by a commercial for ‘Hockey Night MashUp‘. On the Hockey Night MashUp site (which has been in operation since the start of the season), fans can create a mashup highlight reel using a selection of clips from HNIC broadcasts. With the application, fans can choose clips specific to their favourite team. Clips are even categorized (e.g. ‘Goals’ or ‘Celebrations’). Now, this may not seem all that cutting-edge. But, believe me, for HNIC, whose main draw for the past 20 years has been 74 year-old former NHL coach Don Cherry, this is innovative.

I’ve been watching HNIC since I was 3. There were no other games televised, at least in my cable-free home, at that time. Needless to say, HNIC is close to my heart and has special meaning. But in order to resonate with anyone who doesn’t have a deep-seated connection to their broadcasts, HNIC must engage viewers in innovative ways. They indeed seem to be doing so, and not without the help of Wikinomics principles.

(Also note that HNIC has paired with Tim Hortons [sic] on their ‘Every Cup Tells a Story’ campaign [as written about by Jude Fiorillo here], to introduce ‘Stories From the Rink‘).

The reason that I am writing about it here is blatant self-promotion two-fold – we are attempting to build chTONGUEeek by sticking to the principles of wikinomics, and do so at an absolute minimum of out-of-pocket expense. From what we’ve seen so far (with this project and the research), these two things often go hand in hand.

As of right now, the total expense incurred has been a little over $200, and outside of a few plans we have for rewarding contributors, we don’t expect this to go a penny higher for the foreseeable future. About 1/4 of this expense was unavoidable – domain name registration. The rest was for the logo design, and to get us off on the right wikinomics foot we decided to go with crowdSPRING for what eventually became this:

Regular readers may remember I wrote about my interview with the founders of crowdSPRING back in June. The idea behind the company is simple – anybody can post a description of creative project, the reward that they are offering, and the end date. Interested artists within the community then submit designs (the company guarantees a minimum of 25), and the buyer can continually provide feedback as they flow in to guide the community towards what they want, before finally selecting a winner. crowdSPRING takes care of the payments, legal issues, etc.

We decided to post our project for the minimum amount – $150 – with a one week time frame, providing a brief description and an absolutely terrible graphic representing what we were thinking. Over the course of the week we received a total of 69 submissions, with quality ranging from pretty bad to quite intriguing. In order to get the most out of the platform, we provided feedback (at minimum a rating) on every submission in timely fashion, and it was the work of Peg770 that was clearly rising to the top. We sent her a couple of personal message for some final tweaks, and in the end declared her the winner, receiving a portfolio of different logos she had created for us (you can see some of them in the box marked with the award tab). We thought it was a great experience, and absolutely brought home the power and value of crowdsourcing.

From there, we’ve built the initial site through Word Press (free), borrowed some hosting for the time being (free), and had the more skilled of us (not me) get the site designed and “live,” while we both focus on creating some hopefully entertaining content in our spare time (of which there is very little). Next steps include the launch of our initial store through CafePress (either free or $6 / month), figuring out our incentive plan for attracting a community of contributors (probably not free), and most importantly building our social media marketing strategy (free, but what will be the most time consuming). It is the latter I am most interested in, and will be reporting back time and again if something interesting comes up. In the meantime, seats are still available on Twitter and Facebook – but they are going fast .

The traditional knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers do little active work in matching a question with a resident subject expert, instead relying on the community to keep an eye on the topics they’re best equipped to answer. A new social search service (still in beta) called Aardvark.im from the folks at The Mechanical Zoo aims to actively feed questions to self-proclaimed “subject authorities” who take it from there. As you pose and answer questions you build your “knowledge network”—a social network of your conversation participants. The question routing is done via Aardvark’s algorithm, which according to a VentureBeat article, will involve favouring “friends-of-friends” as the first-line recipients, but does the expert finding for you.

The cool element about Aardvark is that it’s a seamless merger of a knowledge market (a la Yahoo! Answers) and real-time conversation tools (Twitter). Want to know where you can get a good sandwich in your neighbourhood? A quick tweet polls the experts in your city, and you have your answer in real-time. Seems like the service could be structured for use within a company intranet too. For example, you could post a question about quarterly performance numbers or about warehouse inventory levels, and the question would get routed to the resident expert in each department, with the responses in real-time. From my experience, that would trump those long email chains that go back and forth trying to find the right person to answer a specific question.

Speed depends on the number of users on the network, which at around 1,200 the service is pretty small (Aardvark is still in beta)—but given that this is a version of an “applied” Twitter, and that beta invites are in short supply, it’s likely Aardvark will find quick cachet with the nation’s sandwich seekers. And other folks too, I guess.

Central to this development is an increased sense of autonomy from human interactions (such as self-repair, stabilizing feedback loops, and self-directed traffic management) and “smartness,”  — something that already exists in an ever-increasing form in the computational clouds of Google and Amazon, which are constantly learning about how it is that we use language, and form an understanding about how collective human behavior can be used to anticipate the actions of an individual.

These two systems are able to “manufacture intelligence” and sell it to the humans that participate in the system (by adding raw usage-information that these clouds use to refine their understanding). This money is then invested by the curators of the cloud to expand its computational power and scope, and the organism grows. While it seems like there’s an intentional blurring of the line between the hardware/software itself, and the companies that use them to deliver the services, I think it’s fair to respond that a corporation is a fairly abstract entity, and if Google were able to do it’s job of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful with fewer employees and more computing power, its shareholders wouldn’t mind so long as the share price continued to rise. So such an organism could be viable as a company.

The final phase of the development towards something lifelike (or maybe even alive) would be self awareness, in which the Internet could map itselfs to determine whether the information it’s delivering comes form within or from without.

All of this, I suspect and hope, is still a few years away. So we don’t yet need upper-year university ethics courses on the proper and just treatment of packets and subroutines, but I find it gives a new perspective to my everyday internet-habits if I assume that each search I make, and every book I buy online, could be contributing, to an infinitessimal degree, to the creation and emergence of a new form of life; and that this process is happening in a surprisingly innocuous and organic way.

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

This week in the roundup:

• Jeff DeChambeau discussed privacy and digital surveillance
• Dan Herman introduced us to ‘vote swapping’ and identified how this Web 2.0 technology now has the potential to influence elections
• Don Tapscott highlighted some new research findings in order address a common misconception about video games and gamers
• Denis Hancock reviewed some of the pitfalls of the traditional crowdsourcing model and introduced us to Poptent

This is Gloucester, a UK based blog, is reporting that the Government Communications Headquarters is pitching a plan that would allow it to monitor all SMS and email messages sent and recieved in the UK. The plan, slated to cost English taxpayers a potential $12bn, would be the country’s largest surveillance program, and adds another data point to the security vs. privacy debate.

As Michael Geist wrote last week, the Internet has become a system that never forgets anything, and there are more and more tools that allow people to mine information from the darkest corners of the Internet.
…
So, are email and sms messages, like public discussions, simply part of a technology that is inherently tracable, or given the targeted nature of email and sms, are they granted a special class of privacy from the rest of the bits that float bout the ‘tubes?

Weigh in on the privacy debate @
Hey England, time to learn about PGP!

A few months ago University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist wrote that 27 MP’s across Canada (9% of all MPs) had won their ridings by less than 1000 votes.  The potential impact of vote swap is thus rather significant.

The second example is www.voteforenvironment.ca . Like the former example, it takes aim at the Conservative government, this time for their environmental record. Their strategy is similar to Vote Swap as it highlights closely contested swing ridings and recommends to would-be voters which of the opposition parties in those ridings would be best positioned to win the riding in the Oct. 14 election.

What do you think of vote swapping and the technology behind it? Share your thoughts @
More on voting and technology…

In my new book, Grown up Digital (a sequel to my 1997 intro to the Net Generation: Growing up Digital) I make the argument that this exposure to gaming and technology has helped enable a truly global and inter-connected generation that sees civic action as a part of their regular routine.

Amanda Lenhart, author of a report on the survey and a Senior Research Specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, notes, “The stereotype that gaming is a solitary, violent, anti-social activity just doesn’t hold up. The average teen plays all different kinds of games and generally plays them with friends and family both online and offline.”

The survey certainly supports this view:

• 52% of gamers report playing games where they think about moral and ethical issues.
• 43% report playing games where they help make decisions about how a community, city or nation should be run.

Are you a videogame player, gamer alumni, or know someone who plays games?
Discuss their impact @ Kids, videogames and social activity

What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms – too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers.
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Poptent has at least three elements that help deal with this. they are targeting the creation of a community of top-notch videographers with great skills, not the public at large. In order to participate on the site companies need to pony up $25 K in cash – which should be enough to limit “speculative requests”. Advertisers than pay something in the $5K – $7.5 K range to purchase ads they like. They are also upfront in noting (see Mark Schoneveld’s comment on October 8th at 11:19) that the contest model is not sustainable – they’ll have to evolve it over time, but you have to walk before you run.

Discuss your views, for and against, the Poptent model @
Poptent: A new community for crowdsourced advertising

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight. Until next week…

The shockwave is moving quickly: venture capital stalwarts Sequoia Capital have been instructing their portfolio companies to prepare for a “doomsday scenario”. Cutting fat, eliminating redundancy, and finding the cheapest darn way to do business is now the imperative of all those wide-eyed, once-well-funded start-ups.

My dad once gave me good advice which I didn’t take. “Son, doctors, dentists, lawyers and teachers are recession-proof. Work smart.” For the most part, it holds true (it seems some lawyers are having a hard time). But it seems like you don’t need to be bricks-and-mortar or an M.D. to stay “recession-resistant”. Like magic, outsourcing marketplaces have been going like gangbusters despite economic woes.

The more people who take pages from Sequoia’s warning to slim down to essential personnel and services find that outsourcing fits the bill nicely. It’s like having talent attached to a spigot—you can match the resource-flow to your cash-flow (and work-flow) on-demand. A Reuters article boasts that Elance (a popular outsourcing marketplace) has increased billings by 65% this year—driven by the need for smaller firms to have a flexible, highly-trained workforce.

If this downturn finds you sitting on the couch, reluctantly watching daytime TV, outsourcing marketplaces could be just ticket to get you off The Young and The Restless and back to the ranks of the gainfully employed.

Poptent is a vibrant community of filmmakers (and actors, comedians, grips, animators and more!) who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents. Through our passions for advertising and commercials, we are exploring a new way of creating branded messages for the Internet age.

Poptent members can show off their work, build a portfolio, collaborate with other creators, leverage our deep set of features, and best of all make money doing what they love.

Poptent brands are seeking new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences. They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. They are, in a word, trendsetters.

What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms – too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers. In such models, companies post a request to a community (for little or no upfront cost) where pretty much anyone can work it, and then if they deem any of the projects worthy they can opt to pay for them. Among other problems, there’s a scale issue here – as more and more people join, you are less and less likely (as a creator) to be successful, and in turn one might expect the best creators to start shying away.

Poptent has at least three elements that help deal with this. they are targeting the creation of a community of top-notch videographers with great skills, not the public at large. In order to participate on the site companies need to pony up $25 K in cash – which should be enough to limit “speculative requests”. Advertisers than pay something in the $5K – $7.5 K range to purchase ads they like. They are also upfront in noting (see Mark Schoneveld’s comment on October 8th at 11:19) that the contest model is not sustainable – they’ll have to evolve it over time, but you have to walk before you run.

Of course, there are challenges with any models like this, and a lot of people disagree with crowdsourcing models entirely. The comments and links after the TechCrunch post are particularly interesting on this front. Of note:

Mark (from Poptent – he has many interesting replies in the comments): As for engagement, yes, they are. However, we aren’t simply going for mass engagement as one might, say, running a CGA contest on YouTube. Rather, we’re looking to tap into a ‘prosumer’ market where folks are actually looking for ways to make money with their video skills, and for brands who want great quality videos.

Evo: Why would anyone produce a commercial on spec. Spec jobs kill the design/creative industry. It takes time to produce a broadcast quality commercial and if you don’t get chosen then you just wasted your time. There is a reason it costs $100K to $500K to make a commercial. Video and Sound editing, actors, lighting, music tracks, this list goes on and on. Also, Time spent in school learning how to do it the right way. (there are a lot of comments on this theme – many people are against spec work).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out – what do wikinomics readers think about it?

In order to explore the problem, the authors look at a dataset of almost 10 million videos on YouTube, submitted by 579,471 people, as of April 30 2008. The key finding is that while one might look at a “digital commons” as a traditional public good, the individuals contributing to the digital commons may perceive their activity as a private good. In this mindset, they’re not necessarily getting money, but rather attention, which can essentially be looked at as a “currency” they are collecting. I would personally call this benefit reputation, as I believe it is the ability to build one’s reputation that is driving the majority of crowdsourcing activity, but it’s essentially the same point.

Now I won’t get into the nitty gritty of how they ran the test – but if you are fluent in things like alphas, p-values, and logs, the write up is fairly interesting (and quite short). I would like to highlight an interesting contrast in the findings though. As one would expect, the researchers found that when attention is low (i.e. few people watching your videos), productivity (i.e. # of videos you upload) drops, and in many cases wastes away to nothing. At this end of the spectrum, individuals compare themselves mostly to the performance of others. Increases in attention have the opposite effect (i.e. more people watching = higher propensity to upload)… and at this end of the spectrum, individuals compare themselves to their own previous benchmarks.

In other words, “bad” is determined in relation to others, but “good” is determined in relation to one’s previous record. Could be an interesting tidbit of information for people looking to grow their own crowdsourcing platform…

Having already launched a number of innovative projects that are increasing the transparency of the US government (including MapLight and Congresspedia) the Sunlight Foundation foundation believes it can help increase participation in the legislative process by providing a forum where all legislation proposals can be subject to open public review in real-time.

Some will argue that the legislative process in the US already invites input through a variety of channels. As our collaborator Beth Noveck notes in a forthcoming report for nGenera (not yet published, but watch this space):

Corporations participate through lobbyists and notice-and-comment rulemaking. NGOs funnel information to government through think tanks and their white papers and publications. Interest groups lobby and enlist their members to respond—usually with postcards and email—in rulemaking and legislative policymaking.

The problem is that the traditional “notice and comment” process tends to favor an entrenched machinery of lobbyists that represent well-connected and often deep-pocketed interests. How many ordinary citizens are even aware of the “notice and comment” periods and how many of those citizens will find the time and resoucres to make formal submissions? I’m guessing that the answer is very few.

So what is different about the more open and collaborative process that the Sunlight Foundation aspires to create with PublicMarkup.org? 

One, it provides a neutral forum in which to debate policy issues. Two, by collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, it makes participation in the legislative process more accessible to citizens. Three, PublicMarkup.org could conceivably evolve into a more robust platform for wiki-drafting, complete with tools for collectively filtering, rating and analyzing evidence, discussion forums for deliberation, and a wiki for drafting recommendations. Finally, by establishing a granular division of tasks (e.g., adding links, tagging and rating content, posting comments in a forum, drafting and editing recommendations, etc.), a collaborative process helps ensure that citizens with a limited amount of time can still make meaningful contributions to the process. 

It’s the group dynamics that ultimately set this new collaborative approach apart from the traditional processes for rulemaking.  In a conventional rulemaking process, atomized and often competitive groups submit comments that they hope will influence the legislative outcome. There is no incentive to compromise and there is often no dialogue whatsoever among the interest groups. When the period for comments is closed, it’s then up to a small group of public officials to sort through the commentary and reach a decision.

With a collaborative process, some of the burden of collecting, sorting, analyzing and drafting shifts to the public, leaving public officials in a position to steer and referree the process. An opportunity space opens up for deliberation, reflection and perhaps even compromise among multiple stakeholders.  

Here’s how Noveck put it in her forhcoming report:   

In a collaborative government, public participation is not pro forma.  Though the recommendations made by private citizens are not binding, they are taken as serious contributions to the decision-making process.  At the same time, collaboration assumes that stakeholders are qualified to make useful contributions to the subject- or industry-specific work of the agency.  As such, a government agency that solicits public feedback employs a system to evaluate the input of the self-selecting private citizen.  Only it is not the government agency that initially evaluates public feedback.  Initially, ratings and recommendations remain in the hands of private citizens.  Their recommendations are vetted by groups ancillary to the government agency.  These groups comprise the very individuals who have volunteered their expertise in the first place.  This alleviates some of the burden that participation outside of organizational boundaries creates for government officials.

Will PublicMarkup.org attract a critical mass of participants? And, will members of the US Congress actually pay attention? It seems unlikley that the latter will happen this time, but if the site evolves into a vital hub for policy debates with a diverse group of participants, then politicians will ignore forums like PublicMarkup at their peril.

Valve, the company who developed Portal, has a long history of openness with their games. With their first game, Half-Life, Valve released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allowed amateur game designers to build their own games on top of the existing engine. Counter-Strike, arguably the most popular FPS game ever, was the result of a fan-made project built on top of the Half-Life engine. Valve ended up hiring the team behind Counter-Strike, and eventually made a sequel.

Staying true to form, Valve released an SDK for Portal. So far as I knew, it was mostly used to make new levels with new challenges. Monday, it was announced that for the past eight months, a fan-made prequel, Portal Prelude, has been silently under development. It serves not only to add content to the existing game, but also greatly expand the scope of the story. In fact, Valve has even approached the team to offer their support and congratulations.

The team released a trailer for their project:

It’s tremendously professional.

Valve has done a fantastic job of building a loyal community around their games, and they’re very relaxed about amateur teams using their characters and settings to tell new stories, it’s very reminiscent of the Japanese manga culture. But instead of just providing their fans with material to adapt, Valve also gives them first-rate tool to work with. Based on the Portal: Prelude trailer, those tools look to be usable to great effect.

Valve, and other companies that open their games, are providing their consumers, and potential employees, with far more than a game, they’re selling a platform (and access to a loyal and enthusiastic community). It’s a fantastic example of openness and prosumption, and with benefits shared among everyone involved. This fan made extension of the story is fitting, given that the original development team was a bunch of students who caught the eye of Valve at a trade show, they were brought on board. Maybe the same thing will happen to this team…

Prelude is due out this month, here’s to hoping that my excitement isn’t misplaced!

Price comparison sites such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping already help users find the best deals by comparing retailers. However, most of these sites only include prices from online sources as opposed to physical stores. Some physical retailers have begun to put their inventory and price information online, however, comparison between them is usually cumbersome. (Not to mention the frequent inaccuracies)

Other forays into the physical world include Craigslist and eBay mashups which place real-estate, used cars and other goods on a map. These services are excellent in helping people locate things, but do little to make the markets for similar goods more efficient. Japan is one of the countries ahead of the curve. A shopper can use their mobile phone to scan QR codes on items like books and compare them to online retailers such as Amazon.

Perhaps the best example of sharing useful information on physical goods is GasBuddy.com, a website that compiles gas prices in the U.S and Canada. Volunteers text or go online to enter prices for gasoline and diesel at fuel stations in their area. The work of thousands of volunteers creates a price map that can be accessed online or though a mobile phone. Although this is unlikely to equalize gas prices across the country, local differences are less likely to persist. The maps also give analysts and regulators a better picture of the differentials across the country.

As the internet, and increasingly mobile technologies, allow people to compile information on various goods and services, the pricing power will slowly shift from sellers to buyers. Buyers in a given area essentially begin to act as one. This shift could have a profound effect on the retail industry.

I want to particularly focus on the last one, which is in relation to Cambrian House (CH). Following a brief discussion about why crowdsourcing and commerce “make uneasy bedfellows”, the article leads into the CH story with “And even those companies that do try to share the proceeds from commercial crowdsourcing are not safe.” Noting that the CH model of encouraging people to send in ideas for new software products, have the community evaluate them, and fund the winners sounded like a good idea, the article then mentions that the chief executive acknowledged that the business model failed.

I assume they’re referring to the comment that CEO Michael Sikorsky made on this TechCrunch article about CH’s failure in May. If you look at his explanation, Michael brings up one particularly interesting reason for the problems CH – “… most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select members of the community. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse… Hence: the wisdom of the crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down.”

But here’s the thing – if you look back on the history of crowdsourcing models, the heavy lifting almost always falls back on a “few select members of the community”. We’ve seen this with Digg, Wikipedia, and a myriad of others – some sort of hierarchy is almost certain to emerge in a crowdsourcing platform, and within this hierarchy a relatively small group of people will do most of the heavy lifting.

In turn, what I’m saying here is that CH shouldn’t have been surprised by this, nor should they have seen it as a business model failure. That was what history indicated would happen. Moreover, as companies start blending crowdsourcing with commerce (i.e. bringing in direct financial incentives), one would expect that it would amplify the effect – and the strategy for the company should have been designed accordingly. This would indicate the Economist’s tongue in cheek final sentence might have some merit – “Perhaps it should have crowdsourced the management of the company, too?”

That’s not to say it would have neccesarily worked, however. This challenge of blending crowdsourcing with commerce is still in it’s infancy, and there is a lot of collective learning to be done – history also tells us that failure is an important part of the innovation process. I think it will be one of our more interesting research topics over the next little while. Right now, I’d agree with the Economist that they’re uncomfortable bedfellows, but somebody is going to figure it out sometime – and might that somebody be VenCorps, who acquired the CH assets in May?

The researchers chose to point the hidden attack at their own server, of course — but were surprised that more than 1,000 Facebook users installed the application, even though they only mentioned it to friends.

That led to a peak of 300 requests per hour and on its peak day, the traffic went above 6 Mbits per second.

It’s a pretty clever attack. But 6Mbits isn’t really that much, it’s roughly equivalent to the maximum speed of a typical DSL connection (or double the speed of a typical DSL connection if your building, like mine, has old copper wiring). Given enough users and sufficiently large taget files, this attack could be pretty potent.

Distributed attacks like these are not new, but using a social networking platform (in this way), instead of unguarded IIS installs, is new. Arguably this is the next step from myspace/msn virus spam, where an account is breached and it messages all of its contacts, requesting that they “install a picture” — which is actually the attack software. But this is the first time that I’ve seen an attack like this that actually delivers value to the nodes (in this case, the application users).

Nefarious hackers have already had users willingly (albeit unknowingly) participate in illegal online activities. In what was another very clever move, spammers were able to get users to solve CAPTCHAs in exchange for free porn (the link is clean). They used these results to sign up for online email accounts, to likely be used to sell pharmacueticals back to those same users.

All of this seems to bring about, once again, the conclusion that technology is not inherently good or evil, but a) people will use it to do bad things (or expose them, like the facebook researchers), and b) users need to be protected, most often from themselves and their unsafe computing habits.

I think that the problem with b) is that computer security education, while quickly growing in importance, simply isn’t sexy. So instead of safe habits, annoying security applications are phoned-in. As computing power moves from the desktop to the cloud, people are going to have to port (or learn) their safe computing habits to a new venue, otherwise it’s going to really be the wild west, where no server or account is safe from harm. Facebook is just the latest example.

Also, and this isn’t exactly Wikinomics related, but the BBC has a great piece on the history of the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Check it out.

One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life – and government – would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.

7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.

“Luke Smith,” said the newscaster on the monitor, “who only yesterday controlled more proxy votes than any other advisor, has been reduced to irrelevance. Almost all of Smith’s supporters abandoned him last night after he tried to use their proxy votes to pass a bill that would have allowed him to collect millions of dollars through a dummy public service provider.” The country’s voting platform gave all citizens the ability to vote on every bill. But many gave their votes by proxy to advisors.

“I wonder how Smith thought he could get away with it,” thought Donald. Open Collaboration Platforms (OCP) were now mandatory for any agency that received government funds. They gave citizens access to all of an organization’s internal activities, including documents and meeting. Not only had these allowed greater collaboration between governments, businesses, citizens, and civil society; they had greatly enhanced oversight, and made it difficult for anyone to get away with corruption.

After the newscast, an ad played. These ads helped pay for the other content Donald watched. His friend Ralph had forwarded this ad to him. “I just signed up. Its great,” said a message from Ralph. The ad was for a new bank account from UniBank. It had low credit rates and high savings rates. Donald thought it sounded good, especially since profits were being used to support internet access for children in the developing world.

Donald decided to follow the link from the ad to the bank’s website. He clicked on Open a New Account and was taken to the government’s Central ID Management System (CIDMS). CIDMS linked all private and public sector databases that contain personal information, both to facilitate data sharing across databases, and to give individuals the ability to manage their privacy.

Donald confirmed that he would like to allow UniBank to create a record of him in their database. He then received a request from UniBank for access to his credit history. He allowed it. He was then asked if we would like to share his name and contact information with UniBank. Donald declined. Because all of his information is shared over the CIDMS, UniBank didn’t need any personal information about Donald to confirm the information he had shared. Providing his name and contact information might have allowed them to give him a more personalized service, but Donald didn’t trust them not to share his information with other companies.

After the account was setup, Donald electronically transferred all of his money and information from his old bank account. He saw that he had a bill from the Hospital of New Delhi. Donald was getting surgery there the following week. He was originally going to go to the local hospital, but there was less of a wait at New Delhi, and besides, it was supposed to be much better. The bill had already been automatically forwarded to, and paid by, the government’s Health Fund. He had also just received his latest electronic paycheck. It outlined exactly where his taxes went: ten percent to education, five percent to the police …

Looking at the clock, Donald realized it was already 7:30. He had to get going. He rolled out of bed, got ready for work, and headed out the door, remembering to take the trash to the curb. In his car, Donald logged into the Car Pool System (CPS). People who wanted a ride could enter a request into the CPS. Car owners were then notified of people they could pickup along their route. In return, the car owner got paid a portion of each passenger’s daily transit allowance.

One of the passengers Donald picked up that morning was Sarah Johnson, the president of the neighborhood council. The council had been formed early in the year, when over half of the neighborhood agreed to create one in an e-vote. Neighborhood councils had authority to improve neighborhood roads and parks, put-up stop signs, and run community programs. In order to pay for their work, neighborhood councils were given money from the city on a per-capita basis.

“You guys really need to improve that park,” Donald said, referring to the park across from his house.

“We’re working on it. You should check out the design proposals on the OCP,” said Sarah.

“I will.”

After dropping off his passengers, Donald went to work at the city planning commission. He logged on to the commission’s online planning map. In addition to displaying current and proposed by-laws, the map provided an interactive, 3D model of the city, including 3D mock-ups of current and proposed buildings. The map was available to all citizens, who could use it to comment on and suggest modifications to proposals.

The Transit Commission had recently uploaded plans for a new subway line. Emergency Services was concerned that the design would make their response difficult in the case of an emergency. They were using the platform to work with the transit commission to solve the problem.

At the same time, citizens had been asked to help design the outside of the new subway stations. Donald’s job was to lead this group of volunteers, and make sure their design stayed within budget.

Before he left work for the day, Donald logged on to the central government’s voter platform and reviewed a list of “upcoming votes and issues that may concern you.” One of the big issues of the day was a bill to ban designer genes. It had actually been drafted by the janitor in Donald’s office. Donald gave his votes by proxy to the New World Party. But the party had not made a decision on this bill. Donald voted against the ban, as the voting system had predicted based on his past voting history. This system of tracking voting behavior had previously suggested Donald transfer his proxy vote from the popular Conservative party to the niche New World party, which he had found was much more in line with his views. Donald donated his monthly allowance for political financing to the party so that it could grow, and garner more influence.

When Donald got home from work, he saw his garbage still sitting on the curb. Donald had switched to a new, environmentally conscious garbage company, but it never picked up his garbage. He logged into his garbage collection account, run by the city government, and switched back to his old company. Now his weekly garbage pickup allowance would be given to a company that actually did their job.

It was getting late, and Donald had a date that night. After a quick shower and a change of clothes, Donald hopped back in the car.

“Would you like to pickup passengers?” the CPS prompted him. Donald declined.

“Probably not the best way to impress the ladies,” he said to himself.

Their website is designed to provide a portal for buyers and sellers of suitable used cars and components, and mechanics who can make the conversion with an electric motor and lithium batteries. Users on the site share ideas on the message board and e-mail lists, with the best information being put into use by the nonprofit community.

The first conversion target of this community will actually be a Toyota Corolla which they say have a range of 93 miles and a top speed of 75 miles per hour. (As a Toyota Corolla owner, this news is exciting to me.) If this community can successfully convert full size gasoline-power cars to run on electricity, look for this trend to catch on in your area. I may even be one of the first to convert my car if this trend hits the USA.

Innocentive, founded in 2001, has grown nearly 30 percent since September of last year from 115,000 members to 145,000. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of Wikinomics, so it’s no surprise that it’s making waves. What interests me, though, is that this article was the third most emailed article of the day. And just to clarify, it’s the overall most popular, not the just science section. Imagine all of those people reading about ideagoras! Maybe I just get a little too excited to see Wikinomics in the mainstream media, and maybe I’m forgetting who reads the New York Times. But wikinomics is infectious, and I clearly have the bug.

More interestingly though, according to the NYT article, is that the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, has “proposed that the government offer $300 million to whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.” Maybe he’s a little technologically-challenged, but at least it seems he’s ready to collaborate. If the government embraces McCain’s proposal, perhaps we will see a solution sought on yet2.com or Innocentive. Perhaps even you can be a part of that solution.

The probable new owners will manage the club, voting online to choose match lineups and buying new players. To help run the team, the fans will be able to view all the matches online and, after the game, receive statistics on how each player has performed. They will also get weekly updates from the team’s head coach on how each player is doing during practice.

It sounded really good – and most commentators particularly focused on the ability to vote on line ups as a key driver of participation. This functionality went live recently, but was hardly a resounding success – less than 2,000 of the over 30,000 members voted on the line ups for some recent games, and the vast majority that did bother to vote elected to let the coach decide. This lack of involvement has led to several articles like this one, which sees it not only a hugely negative development, but as potentially foreshadowing the collapse of the entire experiment. But is it really that bad?

Let’s start with the issue of team selection. When MyFootballClub was launched, numerous sports “experts” thought it would be a massive failure because the “crowd” wouldn’t be knowledgeable enough to select the squad. Now that the option is available, most of the crowd is choosing not to vote – opting rather to let the coach decide. While this is now being spun as a “failure” of the model, might it just represent that the crowd is rational enough to realize that the coach is in a better position to select the squad on a day-to-day basis, and they are happy leaving him to do so (until perhaps he proves himself unworthy?).

Connected to this, articles like the twohundredpercent piece make a quantum leap in logic – given that the majority of participants don’t appear interested in contributing to the day-to-day decision making, it appears they are unlikely to renew again next year. Given that these people did opt to purchase the membership, and many have never engaged in the voting process, isn’t it hard to argue that the ability to vote on everything regularly was the reason they signed up? To use an analogy, if I think people are coming to my hotel for the pool, but few of them use the pool, rather than meaning they’re not going to come back to my hotel, it might just mean that the pool wasn’t the reason they came in the first place.

I can’t say for sure, but I bring this up because it represents a common mistake we see in relation to collaboration – presupposing the reasons why people engage in something, and then declaring it a failure when behavior is actually quite different – when the behavior might just reflect the fact they had different reasons than you initially thought. I’d be very interested in a survey of the membership that asks them why they joined – and what they expect.

Maybe a lot of people are just attracted to the democratized ownership, and the ‘joy’ of co-owning a team rather than having it dominated by one person or a large corporation. And maybe many of these people are happy to let the professionals run the team on a day-to-day basis, but will actually demonstrate the wisdom of crowds in the event things seem to be heading in the wrong direction (i.e. demanding a coaching change, etc.).

I’m not saying these things will happen – I really don’t know, and only time will tell. But we should let this thing play out for awhile before it’s declared dead – and let this crowd prove whether it is truly wise, mad, ambivalent, or otherwise. However, I also don’t want to let MyFootballClub off the hook entirely. To quote Joe’s post:

Online communities, like any organisation, are not fully democratised. Various roles are assumed, such as contributors and leaders, to fully utilise the talents of individuals. The likes of MyFootballClub.co.uk would do well to use the community to discover and exploit the pool of resources available rather than a direct democracy. In football terms, this could have very interesting implications.

This is an important point – there are different ways to leverage a crowdsourcing model that aren’t built on purely democratic principles. Joe talks about the potential to engage part of the membership in the scouting process, similar to the “One for the Birds” contest the St. Louis Cardinals rolled out for their baseball team (I wrote about it here). Might there also be an opportunity to engage parts of the crowd in marketing, mashing up video clips for either entertainment OR game preperation (as Joe also suggests), etc.?

It is notable that approximately 3x more people voted on the uniform designs than the roster selection… which I’m sure few people would expect. MyFootballClub would be well served to seriously think about the best way to engage their community in a variety of different ways, and ideally leveraging all of the web 2.0 tools available to them, rather than just relying on democratic voting process as the differentiator.

Technology empowers users.  Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship).  A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music).  GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress.  However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.

RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based.  It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators.  It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible.  RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music,  I wonder what it will sound like.

It’s pretty humorous (and either slightly sad given what doesn’t happen despite the available tools or slightly scary to think that Steve Jobs may be planning a coup).

My favourites:

• There would be a three hour wait to get the latest $5 bill. It would also feature a web 2.0 gradient.
• Instead of a Social Security number, all newborns would receive a free MobileMe account.
• The cabinet would add the Department for Ergonomic Design, including a new position called theSecretary of Feng Shui. The office would debate the merits of using Arial versus Helvetica on street signs. Additionally, the Lincoln Bedroom would be upgraded with a mini rock waterfall and tiny Bonsai trees.
• Steve Jobs’ face would inexplicably appear next to Roosevelt’s on Mt. Rushmore.
• “In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.

I thought I’d take it one step further and theorize what would happen “if the United Nations were run by Google.”

• The Chinese and Russians would withdraw their vetoes against sanctions on Zimbabwe after Googling “Mugabe” ….
• The Millennium Development Goals would get crowdsourced.
• The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses.
• The Russians would attempt to buy Google with oil money.
• The Security Council would fail to come to agreement on “Don’t be evil” and would instead adopt “Google first, Act later.”

*Authors’ note: The Promethean Institute is a libertarian public policy think tank based in Orange County, California. I am neither libertarian nor Californian and by virtue of being Canadian, less good looking but definitely more in-touch with my socialist side.

Showtime launched the first “Fan Wikis” about a year ago, and has since added pages for each of its shows. Since that time, pages have grown from basic content such as user-created cast bios and episode guides to complete guides of, well, everything related to the show.

Tudors’ fans maintain wikis from everything from costume design to a complete list of Tudor executions. Weed’s fans meticulously study characters’ wardrobes and post where to buy the exact article of clothing online. And it’s not a rogue few participating, either. The L Word wiki boasts more than 7,000 members.

Participation is simple. All a fan must do is register with Wetpaint and then check out what tasks are listed on the wiki To-Do list.

I haven’t decided what I think is more genius: Showtime outsourcing website content development to volunteers, or enabling fans to create fan sites on the actual Showtime site, keeping precious traffic right where they want it.

Showtime’s Fan Wikis are powered by Wetpaint, which describes itself as a place where “you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks off.” The company announced May 19 it had raised $25 million to “accelerate the company’s growth.” According to TechCrunch, Wetpaint has now raised more than $40 million in all. On Wednesday, Wetpaint announced that more than 1million free social Wetpaint pages had been created since July 2006.

I’d like to see how Ben Letalik would grade Showtime in his weekly Wikinomics report card. Fan wikis combined with The Tudor’s multi-platform campaign launch of Season 2 (Showtime aired the entire season premiere for free on more than 60 sites, including Netflix and MSN) are very good examples of openness and sharing.

I started watching The Tudors (and subscribed to Showtime) after watching the Season 2 premiere on Netflix for free. I fell for Showtime’s 2.0 marketing plan hook, line, and sinker. Will Showtime’s innovative strategies and social networking features help it get an edge on long-time enemy (and market leader) HBO?