Crowdsourcing image analysis. A study of work by Amazon Mechanical Turks studied their accuracy in analyzing Google Street Map images for wheelchair accessibility. Results: 81% accuracy without any quality controls and 93% with the addition of simple quality control schemes.
(via Crowds Helping Make City Sidewalks More Accessible | Follow the Crowd)
Crowd Competes against Crowd to Produce Quality Design Are design problems suitable for crowdsourcing? In this approach, chemists and designers teamed to compete for a winning logo.
As social business advocates we champion information-sharing at work and bemoan cultures that don’t. However, according to recent academic research, there may be good reasons, beyond intellectual property and privacy issues, for people not to share,
An ethnographic study of a bio-informatics team in China looked at practices around sharing software. Sharing data is central to contemporary science, and software is of primary importance to its progress. Accordingly, investigators — from the School of Computer Science at Fudan University in Shanghai and the Human Centered Design & Engineering department at the University of Washington in Seattle — to understand the tension between sharing and control within an emerging discipline that merges biology with IT.
A fishing pole instead of a fish
One of their findings relates to internal practices. For example, members of a team write their own code, or script, in the course of their work. But instead of posting it online for all team members to use as needed, they share it only when asked for it. Investigators uncovered good reasons for this practice.
Training junior members of the team has high priority; so faculty and senior researchers need to determine when to share what is already available and when to have students practice coding themselves. Finding answers on the intranet may help scientists-in-training solve an immediate problem. It does not, however, necessarily develop the skills they need to innovate in the future. Hence the use of a “request-and-give” protocol for sharing.
Documentation and peer review
Another finding looks at boundaries to sharing software across the wider scientific community. When submitting an academic paper for review, scientists must also provide documentation, rationale and algorithms for the software they used in their work. In this way the publication of scientific findings is tied to the associated software as part of the peer review process. Proliferation of undocumented software is thereby controlled and the scientific community gains access to software they can trust and use.
So, what is the purpose of this non-judgmental way of looking at sharing versus control? For the authors of this study it’s the way to create better social software. Do you think their findings apply to social software in business settings? And if so, to what extent?
Social Finance Inc. (SoFi) is one of a handful of startups aiming to change the way student loan debt is handled. Founded by a group of Stanford Graduate School of Business alumni who graduated in 2011, SoFi offers relatively inexpensive student loans via school alumni, who also serve as a network of contacts post-graduation.
On average, borrowers save approximately $10,000 compared to a bank loan. They also gain connections to alumni with a vested interest in their success. At Stanford, where SoFi piloted its program last year with 40 alumni and 100 students, one lender indirectly hired a borrower. Another alum put a borrower in touch with 10 contacts in his network.
Tom Malone, founder of the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT Sloan discusses his group’s efforts to find out what gives groups superior cognitive abilities across a wide variety of tasks. Statistically, group intelligence only moderately correlates with individual 
intelligence;the most important attributes proves to be social perception, taking turns in discussions, and percentage of women in the group.
See also -
Sensr, an authoring environment, enables citizen scientists without programming skills to build mobile data collection and management tools for collecting data about the environment and their communities.
Via Follow the Crowd
How and when to swarm in social business. Online swarms that work do so by simplifying the possible range of actions to fewer and simpler choices and decisions — for example, when applying a simple rating to post or product. When the actions are more complex like discussions and debates, even when you have masses of people, you don’t really have swarm behavior. Via Forbes
Meet the ‘bots’ that edit Wikipedia. They perform a wide range of editorial and administrative tasks that are tedious, repetitive and time-consuming but vital.They delete vandalism and foul language, organise and catalogue entries, and handle the reams of behind-the-scenes work that keep the encyclopaedia running smoothly and efficiently and keep its appearance neat and uniform in style.
In brick-and-mortar library terms, bots are akin to the students who shelve books, move stacks from one range to another, affix bar codes to book spines and perform other grunt tasks that allow the trained librarians to concentrate on acquisitions and policy.Via BBC News
As easy as it is for information to be taken from the enterprise and shared externally, it should be just as easy (and seamless) to take information externally and share it within the enterprise.
For example, a customer has an issue that needs to be resolved, this issue is crowd-sourced internally to find the best solution instead of just being routed to one person who may or may not have the answer.
Response time improves as does the quality of the response.
We’ve seen platforms that help those with parking spots or gardens loan out their assets to those looking to rent, and now we’ve come across a new startup that’s doing something similar on a bigger scale. UK-based Field Lover recently launched a field-owner/event-organizer matchmaking site. READ MORE…
via springwise:
