52 recipe contests to spawn crowdsourced cookbook, Springwise, September 9, 2009
“There are a multitude of foodie websites and blogs catering to most every culinary whim, but food52 is one with an especially clear premise: 52 weeks, 52 recipe contests, and a crowdsourced cookbook to celebrate the result.”

Service uses Twitter to crowdsource ideas overnight, September 4, 2009
“If two heads are better than one, it’s hard to argue with the premise of crowdsourcing, which taps multiple brains for a common end. Now offering such capabilities overnight is Ideas Culture, an Australian firm that puts creative thinkers around the globe to work via Twitter to solve a client’s problem by morning.”

Crowdsourcing marketing and publicity for Ford’s 2011 Fiesta, Automotive News, September 14, 2009
“Ford handed out 100 European-spec Fiestas to 100 YouTube personalities last spring as part of a campaign dubbed “Fiesta Movement” to raise awareness for the car, which is being reintroduced next summer. And so far those pros delivered, creating double the number of videos Ford expected. The videos attracted 3.5 million views and helped boost awareness of the car to 38 percent among 16- to 24-year-olds.”
Update: How Ford does social media, Socialmedia.biz, November 9, 2009; Previous: Ford Takes Online Gamble With New Fiesta

Competitive Crowdsourcing

Announcing the Health Reform Video Challenge, Care Organizing for America, September 27, 2009
“The Organizing for America’s Health Reform Video Challenge. Create the best 30 second video you can that makes the case for passing health insurance reform in 2009. The top submissions will be voted on by the public and a panel of experts, with the winning ad aired on national television.”

Crowds judge world’s biggest art prize, Springwise, September 28, 2009
“ArtPrize will award the world’s largest prize—USD 250,000—to the piece of art that receives the most votes from visitors. It’s breaking ground not only by letting the crowd be the judge, but also in allowing any artist to enter and any space to exhibit.”

Vitaminwater’s new flavour created with Facebook app, Springwise, September 21, 2009
“Vitaminwater is inviting users to create new flavors and vitamin content. After adding the FlavorCreator app from Vitaminwater’s Facebook page, users can help influence the flavor, functional benefits and design of the new water.”

High-heeled shoes, designed by the crowds, Springwise, September 16, 2009
Winnipeg-based Dream Heels holds a design contest each month to pick a new printed high-heeled shoe to put into production.

Crowdfunding for creative endeavors, Springwise, August 25, 2009
“Brooklyn-based Kickstarter has picked up the concept and created a new site where artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, explorers and others can raise the funds for their next big idea.”

Contest asks fans to design their own doughnut, Springwise, August 11, 2009
“Krispy Kreme, the global doughnut chain is holding a ‘fave fan’ contest that will allow winners to design their own doughnuts.”

Sustainable forest supported through crowdfunding, Springwise, August 4, 2009
“For an annual membership fee of USD 550, members of Driftless Farm’s Community Supported Forest get access to the abundance of a 140-acre sustainable forest along with activities, services and workshops.”

Why the Microgrid Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Crisis, Fast Company, July 1, 2009, Anya Kamenetz

“The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100% green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone. Companies like GE and IBM are talking in terms of up to half of American homes generating their own electricity, renewably, within a decade.

What we’re talking about here is potentially a shift every bit as profound as the switch from mainframes to PCs, or from landlines to cellular — a movement from behemoth centralized power plants to a network of privately owned, renewable, geographically distributed installations, managed using the same kind of packet-switching software that regulates the flow of information over the Internet.” Keywords: distributed energy, microgrid.

Crowdsourcing slashes software testing time, ComputerWeekly.com, July 30, 2009

Most people are familiar with crowdsourcing from reading the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which uses volunteers across the world to update its content. But US-Israeli firm uTest has pioneered crowdsourcing to help companies test their software. The technique is attracting growing number of converts, including Microsoft and Google.

Why do the testers do it ? One reason is financial. Testers can expect to earn cash for each bug they find. Rates start at between $2 and $12 when testers first sign up. But participants can earn more as they prove their worth. The top testers earn up to $30 for each bug found.

“It’s not just about money, it’s about reputation. It gives a tester a place he can expand his skills and test his skills. It makes him a better test manager,” says UTest CEO and founder Doron Reuveni. ”Testing is an ideal subject for crowdsourcing,” says Reuveni. “You need a lot of people. You want them to collaborate, and you want them to work in real time.”

Some companies prefer to carry out testing in a real, rather than an online, environment. uTest’s UK partner TCL, offers what it calls “Software Slams,” where it brings teams of testers together in a pub or a restaurant to put software through its final paces. It calls the process Pub Exploration of Software Testing (Pest). The result is a geeky version of the pub quiz, where teams compete to find the most bugs, in return for cash prizes, free beer and pizza. The events often raise money for charity.

U.S. government sponsors Flu Prevention PSA Contest, The White House, July 9, 2009

HHS is launching a new PSA campaign contest to encourage more Americans to get involved in the nation’s flu preparedness efforts by making a 15, 30 or 60 second video Public Service Announcement (PSA). The goal of the contest is to tap into the nation’s creativity to help educate Americans about how to plan for and prevent the spread of the flu and the H1N1 virus.

The videos can be funny, cute, dramatic, but most of all, they should help make a positive impact. HHS is organizing an expert panel to evaluate submissions and will present the best PSAs to the public so everyone can vote on their favorite submission. The winning PSA will receive $2,500 in cash and will appear on national television.

Participants submit ideas for the quilt squares online while the crowd votes and rates the submissions.  The winning ideas will be produced and become a part of the American Masterpieces: Weaving the District’s Future exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington DC beginning at the end of September 2009.

The exhibition, lead by Patricia Autetrieth featuring a special lecture by Faith Ringgold, encourages the public to interact with the piece by moving the squares and remixing the pattern.

For the purpose of understanding the evolution of our economy and our quality of life, if there was ever one definitive graphic, this is it. However, to understand the current creative, knowledge-based, whole new mind economy from an individual’s point of view, you have to get to know the work at Think Studio, a global think tank based in Switzerland.

The chart above illustrates the direct economy, where “customer knowledge is replacing producer knowledge”. ThinkStudio illustrates this economic model through the two dimensions of knowledge and interactivity.

The five progressive levels of knowledge:
1. Passive - Listening to music, surfing the web.
2. Self service - eBay, Amazon, iTunes.
3. Do-it-yourself - IKEA, mixing music.
4. Co-design - Wikipedia, blogs.
5. Co-creation - Linux, open source, crowdsourcing.

The five progressive levels of knowledge:
1. Raw data - “19.”
2. Information - “19 degrees Celsius, a temperature”
3. Classification/categorization - “Weather in Geneva in January”
4. Process/time - “The temperature range in Geneva in January over the past 50 years.”
5. Logic - “Recognizing that it is has never been this warm in Geneva in January allows us to understand that this might be the result of global warming. And if we understand the logic of this process, we might be able to model it mathematically, thus leading to prediction of future temperatures or some form of automation.”

To reach the level of creative enthusiasm, that’s about heading to the top right of the chart… and the future of our economy and culture. With the basics of the direct economy explained, we can delve deeper into how we can individually make this happen locally. Stay tuned.

Read more about the direct economy via ThinkStudio’s resource page.

Arlington County, Virginia is not only financing a $10 million, 55,000 s.f. urban creative center in one of their key downtown areas (Rosslyn), but they’re looking to crowdsource it. From the Washington Post article, Dreaming of a Rosslyn Renaissance: At the Old Newseum Building, Arlington County Plans Again to Create an Urban Arts Center.

“It will be more social, more about people being part of the artistic process as opposed to being an audience to someone else’s art.” says Norma Kaplan, division chief of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources.

For instance, the area being planned for the visual arts gallery might have four large, curated shows each year of national or international stature. Then, for the two- to three-week breaks between shows, “crowdsourced” exhibits could give a wide variety of people a say in what they wanted to see. “It wouldn’t necessarily have to be about art,” Kaplan said. “Perhaps it’s a local designer or inventor. They could put up their works in progress.”

Just one Metro stop from the Kennedy Center, the cultural arts center in Arlington would be wholly different, far more experimental and risk-taking and “incubating” up-and-coming artists. “We’ll have high quality and sometimes funky or weird things that you’re just never going to get at the Kennedy Center,” says Arlington County Manager Ron Carle.

With so many single 20-somethings settling in Arlington, Carlee said he wants the center to be a real draw for them to hang out. He turned to the bank of windows where he sees the future bar. “There are just great visuals here,” he said. “Can’t you just see young people sitting here, having a mojito, or whatever the hot drink is?” The seating just outside the bar should be like Starbucks, “but funkier.” And the ballroom - currently a dark space with almost-black shag carpet - he sees with sprung hardwood floors perfect for contra, salsa and ballroom dancers.”

The inspiration for crowdsourcing the center generated from the buzz surrounding Creative Arlington, the latter of which was co-developed by MobFuse. The promotional teaser video for the center (see below) was also produced by MobFuse, sponsored by Arlington Cultural Affairs and Rosslyn BID.

CreativesDC launched July 11, 2008 with two ‘gatekeeper’ members organizing a kickoff party on July 23.  Via the viral loop word of mouth system, the community has reached over 600 members one year later, with six events spawning crowdsourcing initiatives, such as a triple bottom line live music nightclub.

What’s the point? One longtime wistful request of the innovators in DC has been a forum to meet one another, even collaborate. What CreativesDC provides is not only an opportunity to provide that, but the means to create, as stated, the actual places (eg a design-oriented coworking site), events (eg monthly happy hours) and scenes (eg an active daytime entrepreneurial population) that represent those collaborations - via its groups. This can easily be replicated in other cities.

“Conspicuous, but not Consuming. Much has been said about how Facebook, Twitter, and blogging have revolutionized social networking and connectivity. But just as importantly, these channels for self-expression represent a new way to be conspicuous without the consumption. Take Twitter, for example, which expanded at a rate of almost 1400 percent in February 2009. Its sole purpose is to facilitate conspicuousness, allowing users to provide followers, many of whom are strangers, with minute-by-minute updates.

An entrepreneur friend in Silicon Valley recently told me he sold his BMW because he was embarrassed to show up in it for meetings with younger software engineers in the coffee shops of Palo Alto. The car detracted from—instead of reinforced—his identity.

This shift from material goods to self-expression and social capital is heartening, but the real story is not in the coffee shops in California, but in villages in India and small towns in China that are just beginning to get online… the newest form of conspicuousness is instantly transferable across geographies and cultures, and is spreading much faster than consumerism did.

“Conspicuous consumption” is being replaced by “conspicuous expression” as the driver of identity. This new paradigm emphasizes the conspicuousness of ideas, interests, and opinions rather than accumulating more stuff than your neighbor.”

Story referred by Christian MacAuley of Bubbly.