Crowd Sourcing. A Twitter Cast.

On a Third Tuesday Public Relations MeetUp Monica Hamburg spoke to the relatively new phenomenon of 'Crowdsourcing'.

I TwitterCast the event live. Miss604 generously live Blogged. Jenn Lowther of Invoke Media took amazing notes too. Between the three of us and the Flickr photos you'll get the gist of Monica's dynamic and fast-paced presentation. What follows are the bullet points posted live via Text message.

Crowd Sourcing is new but not the answer to everything. Wired's Jeff Howe introduced the term in 2006.

Comments on Blogs demonstrate the collective knowledge of the audience.

WikiPedia is an excellent example of the shared intelligence.

SellaBand.com asks visitors/fans/participants to contribute financially to the recording of an album from their 'believers'.

Threadless is a crowd-sourcing t-shirt manufacturing company.

NetFlix has put up a Million dollars for a better movie rating algorithm for more relevant results.

Lego has crowd-sourced toys. Google has Image Labeler.

Passion is why we Crowd-Source. Money can help tip the scales. We want to be seen as experts. We want to feel connected.AskSpace and Wired's Project Zero are examples of failed crowd-sourcing. Books written by many doesn't work either.

Good leadership, being open to feedback, transparency, and clear benefits to the contributor are vital.

Engaging a crowd that trusts social media is very important.

Crowd sourcing is a long term commitment.

Passion, community and respect drive crowd sourcing involvement.

Tap into a cause that people are passionate about to gain momentum.

Appeal to a community that may exist already.

Respect your contributor. Be clear on what their tangible benefit is for participating.

Q&A

Q&A WikiPedia and some crowd-sourcing suffer from the Hawthorne Effect. This is an initial surge of interest followed by a drop off.

Q&A Facilitation is more important than leadership perse when crowd sourcing.

Q&A Innocentive is an example of a using a very specific community.

Q&A Assignment Zero suffered from an inundation of information and mission creep

Q&A Contributors to a crowd sourced project crave credit and recognition.

Q&A Crowd sourcing is generally not for profit but can benefit the creator from the Halo effect.

Q&A There's a person who is crowd sourcing who is from Beirut, Lebanon looking
for support to grow a tech community there.

The End. Applause. We now resume regular programming.

Raul clarifies one of his questions and brainstorms some potential problems when Crowdsourcing.