Crowdsourcing and Peter Diamandis.

This Thursday I fly to Berlin for a two-day workshop with fellow-authors, where we'll present (and discuss) chapters for a book Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop are putting together. The book deals with how new technology (phones, satellites, mapping, etc.) can be used and enable us to learn about and solve big problems. I'm writing a chapter based on our experiences with Voix des Kivus: our cellphone-based system that we implemented in Eastern Congo to learn about local level events (more here). In brief, the chapter will first discuss the benefits of crowd-sourcing, and will then introduce and discuss crowd-seeding. While crowd-sourcing sources-out tasks to an undefined public, crowd-seeding selects (part of) the crowd and does this randomly. The reason why is so that one obtains representative data -- often crucial when collecting information. The chapter, however, continues by discussing in more detail especially ethical issues that were raised while operating Voix des Kivus -- issues that should be kept in mind when launching such a system. See the following document that Macartan presented at the University of British Columbia earlier this year, for a brief discussion.

While working on the above I came across a TED-talk by Peter Diamandis -- a very impressive person (understatement). He is among others the the Founder and Chairman of the X Prize Foundation; an educational non-profit institute whose mission is to create radical break-throughs for the benefit of humanity. They do this by offering large (monetary) prizes to "the crowd". A fantastic application of crowd-sourcing. The TED talk is about his recent book  "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think". I haven't read it yet, but the talk is promising and -- by using the argument of crowdsourcing -- he makes quite a case for optimism about our future: