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Crowd Forum |

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About

Crowd Forum is a social network and wiki where people who share an interest in crowdsourcing and open innovation can share ideas and learn about this emerging phenomenon. Crowd Forum was created by the founders of Microengagement, a consulting practice that helps companies leverage the power of their business/brand constituents "the crowd" to develop products, accurately predict environmental, product, and sales outcomes and create new levels of customer intimacy by involving customers in the business processes.

What is crowdsourcing?

Our view of crowdsourcing is: "A growing phenomon that describes the process of gathering groups of people together and using their untapped knowledge to create something of value."

Crowd Forum serves three primary audiences:

Business leaders who are looking to improve their results through crowdsourcing and share what they have learned with others.
Researchers, the media and general public who can use Crowd Forum as an educational tool.
Crowdsourcing practitioners and consultants who share tools & techniques and network with each other.

What's New

On the site:

The Economics of Crowdsourcing

Take a deeper look into how crowdsourced organizations outperform traditional business models in terms of product development costs & upfront investment.

Netflix Prize

Learn how Netfliximproved its recommendation service 8.5% by offering a $1 million prize. You will be surprised whose in the lead.

Goldcorp Challenge

Goldcorp - a Canadian mining company – increased its market value from $100 million to $9 billion for $575,000 invested in the “Goldcorp Challenge” to anyone who could use its own publicly offered mining data to find new sources of the precious metal.

In the news:

Wikia Search

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia latest project is an open source search engine. Wikia has indexed 30 million Websites, and is rolling out a set of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results.

Everyone's a Historian Now

How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate. Boston Globe

Cornerstones of Crowdsourcing

Self Selection - People will do a better job placing themselves than an HR Dept.
Democratic Decision Making - The crowd is unfettered by politics and will (on balance) make objective decisions.
Fresh Perspectives - Experts outside the designated discipline can solve problems in unique ways (triangulation)
Equal Voices - By not meeting physically a greater number of participants will participate
Meritocracy - Those who have consistently contributed the highest quality work will be the best managers

Natural Selection - What works well is absorbed into the whole, what does not work is rejected without malice
Self Healing - Since the producers are themselves consumers, great care is taken to fix problems
Self Organization - Members will seek the help of others and form teams to achieve a goal