open source | AssignmentZero

Crowdsourcing Maps

nfolson

in

Assignment:

Steve Coast of OpenStreetMap.

Reporting page:

The OpenStreetMap, what's possible when geographic information is shared?

Nate Olson interviews Steve Coast via email May 12-21, 2007

Steve Coast is a London-based programmer at the helm of OpenStreetMap (OSM), one of the Web's premier collaborative mapping projects. OpenStreetMap is billed as "a free editable map of the whole world... made by people like you." Anyone can use a GPS device to map his or her home neighborhood, upload it to OSM, and see the data included in the main user interface. The results are available for re-use under a Creative Commons license--a key selling point of OSM, which Steve created largely as an alternative to the kind of restriction-laden geodata used by Google Maps and similar applications.

Nate Olson: Do you consider "crowdsourcing" to be a distinct phenomenon? If so, how do you see it evolving over the next 1-2 years?

Steve Coast: Most definitely, and hopefully it's going to turn some business models upside down. I think of it more broadly than just building commons a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia. If you consider zopa.com (the peer money-lending site) as crowdsourcing, then you can start to see some really powerful things happening. They give savers with little capital access to high interest rates, and [also give] borrowers access to better-than-average [repayment] rates while doing interesting social stuff on the side. All while removing this big "bank" concept. You could think of Skype and Joost similarly--no need for expensive cable distribution networks when you force your users to do the bandwidth for you (they're both p2p apps).

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5/24/07

The Academics of Crowdsourcing

JJackUnrau

in

Assignment:

Karim Lakhani, the scholar of crowdsourcing

Reporting page:

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

The "Expertise of the Periphery," a Harvard Business professor weighs in on the crowd

J Jack Unrau interviews Karim Lakhani via telephone on May 14th, 2007

Karim Lakhani is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Technology and Operations Management Unit. He is a serious scholar of crowdsourcing, trying to build theories of if, how and why it works. In the past he's also written on open source theory and innovation, including articles about Wikipedia and open source science.

J Jack Unrau: The first thing I wanted to ask you was, what got you into the whole idea of studying crowdsourcing?

Karim Lakhani: I've been studying open source communities since '98 and open source is sort of a precursor to the crowdsourcing meme. That interest actually came out of my...both academic interest but also professional experience when I worked at General Electric in medical systems and I discovered that a lot of the innovations that GE was going to "bring to life" - you know the tagline "bringing things to life" - were already done by users. In a new product development/marketing role that I had at GE I just couldn't understand this at all. I guess with all the sort of the wisdom and training I got at both GE and also in undergrad in Engineering and business that seemed kind of counter-intuitive.

When I ended up at MIT to do my Master's degree in Technology and Policy I noticed the same thing where users were developing all the software I was using in my research - you know Linux and Apache and so forth - and it remained a puzzle as to why this would be happening. So I took a course on innovation and management at the Sloan school where Eric Von Hippel sort of talked about user driven innovation. He had shown that in many products that users were the first people to innovate and now what it looked like was not just that users were innovating but they were creating whole new systems and sort of replacing the traditional role of manufacturers in terms of design, build, support and so forth.

So that got me interested in open source communities and I switched my research topics from biomedical into actually open source and distributed innovation kind of work. Specifically in terms of ... one of the things I was doing in my dissertation explicitly was to investigate extensions of the open source model to other settings and I came across InnoCentive. They were taking one core practice of broadcasting your problems to anyone else in the world and getting help from anybody else in the world and I said "Wow! This is exactly like this one narrow practice of open source."

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5/15/07

Got a Great Idea? Maybe You Should Give It Away

Leonard Witt

in

Assignment:

Interview Eric von Hippel

Reporting page:

Eric von Hippel -- MIT Sloan School of Management

The business practices of doing everything out in the open

Leonard Witt interviews Eric Von Hippel over AIM, also posted at his blog: PJNet.org

Eric von Hippel, who has literally shattered the iron walls around “innovation” and brought it to the realms of every man; every user, speaks to Leonard Witt on his concepts around lead user and free revealing. The MIT Sloan School of Management professor, whose highly acknowledged book, "Democratizing Innovation", talks of “users of products and services – both firms and individual consumers" _ innovating and developing the exact product that they want and then freely sharing the information, sharply contrasts this democratic process from the hitherto closed door world of manufacturing.

Von Hippel talks of people at the leading edges of important trends who will be experiencing needs today that the bulk of the market will experience tomorrow and argues that it may be better to freely reveal one's best ideas rather than keep them secret because one could cash in on them some day.

Leonard Witt: Your book "Democratizing Innovation" intrigues me because so much of it is counterintuitive. What does democratizing innovation mean?

Eric von Hippel: It means that users of products and services--both firms and individual consumers--are increasingly able to innovate for themselves.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: Sure - it is easier today to design a custom integrated circuit (a field programmable logic devices or FPLD) for yourself - using sophisticated tools that are now available - than it was five years ago.

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4/19/07

Economics of Open Sourcing

Posted April 8th, 2007 - 03:18AM by Maurreen Skowran

in

Eric S. Raymond is a programmer who wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar":
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

It includes an economic explanation of why open-source programming works, "The Magic Cauldron":
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/index....

He addresses the "Tragedy of the Commons'' here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s0...

4/8/07

Giving Gas to Open Source Car Design

Posted December 21st, 2006 - 04:19AM by Anonymous

in

Designing a car from scratch has long been an amusing mental exercise for automotive hobbyists, or a quirky team project for undergraduate engineers at places like MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. But, Germany’s Markus Merz wants to go farther, he’s the brains behind the OScar project, a vastly ambitious plan to design and build automobiles using open-design principles.

“I believe in the basic need of the individual for mobility, but not the way the automobile industry is fulfilling that need from an environmental point of view,” Merz told NewAssignment.Net. “There is space for innovation in this field.”

For Merz, the process of collaborative design for aluminum and rubber is no different than for Linux and Firefox. Or, as Merz would have it, “hardware” over “software.”

“It’s about being modular without having too many modules,” Merz said. He’s broken down OScar’s design to six such modules: Board (the drivetrain), Body (chassis), Engines, Power, Safety, and Information Systems. Once the coupling points are agreed upon, design for each module can run independently. And as a bonus, a modular design allows the theoretical OScar driver to swap parts as needed, easily changing a passenger car to a pick-up truck.

12/21/06

Not Your Mother's Knitting - How Traditional Crafts Change for the Internet

Posted December 12th, 2006 - 02:36AM by Anonymous

in

Creative Knitting Taught Online: Photo courtesy BPC on FlickrKnitting is a centuries-old skill, traditionally passed from one generation to the next within families and small communities. After learning by example the basics of knit one, purl one, apprentice knitters pick up more advanced techniques like decorative stitches and buttonholes by imitating

So what's a lone knitter in Malaysia to do? Knitters have gone online; of the many corners of the Internet, the immense knitting blog network is one of the liveliest and coziest.

Along with a general rise in the popularity of knitting in the past few years, the Internet has seen a proliferation of knitting blogs and other online resources like video tutorials and webzines dedicated to the craft. Blog rings, like knitting blogs, can include a loose association of blogs from Nordic Knit Blogs (for Scandinavian aficionados of the craft) to Christian Knitters (for the born-again knitter). Hundreds and sometimes thousands of bloggers -- connect online because of their passion for knitting.

12/12/06

Open Source Moves Deeper into Product Development

Posted December 12th, 2006 - 01:33AM by Anonymous

in

Business resources just became easier to find. "What citizen journalism and YouTube have done for media, CrowdSpirit hopes to do for product development," according to this post on Springwise, a blog on future business ideas.

As the name suggests, CrowdSpirit is part of the crowdsourcing phenomenon, but it takes it into a new wave, where the 'group think' method is used to refine real world hardware products. Crowdspirt "aims to start a revolution in manufacturing by creating the first electronic products driven and inspired by customer's wishes and expectations."

This site encourages inventors to submit electronic product designs to the online CrowdSpirit community, who in open source fashion, refine the original products and vote on which ones should move forward.

12/12/06

Q&A with Participatory Culture Foundation Founders

Posted November 28th, 2006 - 12:17PM by Amanda Michel

in

Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson are two of the founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). The nonprofit organization is dedicated to building a set of free and open tools that will let online video grow in a decentralized, open access direction. PCF is based in Worcester, MA.

Amanda Michel caught up with Nicholas and Holmes to discuss Democracy, PCF's open source video player and their role in our Internet TV culture.

-------------------------------------------------

Would you quickly describe Democracy?

Wilson: Democracy is a free, open source video player and downloader with a simple interface. It plays virtually any video, you can explore and download video podcasts and bittorrent feeds, and you can search for and save videos from sites like YouTube. It's also a vision for Internet video distribution that embodies all the best principles of the Internet: openness, competition, and freedom from centralized control. Anyone can use Democracy Player to distribute video directly to their audience without being dependent on Youtube/Google.

Who uses Democracy? What do you know about your users and community?

Reville: It's a really hard question to investigate, actually. We know that the content that's being submitted to our Channel Guide really runs the gamut. Since we're a video app, I expect our user base is broad, but probably leaning towards early tech adopters, blogosphere, etc.

11/28/06

Open Source Publishing Hits Video Games

Posted November 24th, 2006 - 10:10AM by Anonymous

in

Open source is moving beyond software to book editing. McKenzie Wark, author of the draft networked book, GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1, is turning to fellow computer game lovers to help write his book.

In collaboration with The Institute for the Future of the Book, Wark made his book available for discussion and revisions online. Gamer geeks can view the book's nine chapters, comment on the content, create new topics and make suggestions in regards to game play. Contributors will receive credit for anything that makes it into the final version of the book, which is trying to "unlock the curious character of video games as allegories for the world we live in," according to Wark. The newest print edition is due out in the spring, but it might not be the last. The book will remain online and will evolve along with the gaming communities comments.

11/24/06

Craig Silverman Took NewAssignment.Net to BarCamp, Montreal. Here's His Report.

Posted November 7th, 2006 - 03:05AM by CraigSilverman

in

The leaders of the American magazine industry recently huddled together in Arizona for the American Magazine Conference. Interestingly, a few of the speakers at the event hit upon a common theme: accuracy.

First, Time Inc. Chairman and CEO Ann Moore chastised bloggers and mainstream media for a “lack of ‘fact checking,’ allowing rumors to migrate ‘to the mainstream press’,” according to a report on media minder FishBowlNY. Then People group editor Martha Nelson took aim at the "misinformation and speculation" and "sheer lies" to be found in the blogosphere. (Publicist to the stars Ken Sunshine also piled on.)

It’s interesting to see Accuracy with a Big A highlighted and used as a differentiator by media executives. They want to send the message that the work they do has standards, actual and factual while the blogosphere is littered with rumors, speculation and whole hog fabrications. Beware of Blogs, reads their sign.

Quite a contrast with the feedback I received from regular (albeit very tech savvy) folks when I gave a presentation about NewAssignment.Net at BarCamp Montreal (Oct. 21). While attendees didn’t express total confidence in blogs, they were more interested in discussing the problems with bias and inaccuracy that exist in the mainstream press.

11/7/06