Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing covers a lot more than just individuals providing art for different frames of a short film. It also includes crowdfunding, microtasks, and open innovation. Crowdfunding is when many individuals provide financial help for whatever the project may be, and mircotasks are when many tasks are completed by many different individuals for the same project. Open innovation is like asking many people to work together to bring ideas to life.

I think it is interesting to note that Wikipedia can almost be seen a microtask platform. Many people are adding and changing all the time. The Ted Talk by Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia sees an average of 1.4 billion page views monthly. That's a lot of traffic on one website, but also increases chances for addition when there needs to be.

Aaron Koblin made an interesting point in his Ted Talk as well. He claimed that with the interfaces we have now, we have an obligation to maintain humanity and tell some amazing stories. I think it was the most poignant part of his Ted Talk and I enjoyed it immensely. One of my favorite things to watch are projects about humanity, glimpses into it. Facebook has this wonderful page called Humans of New York where photographs and snippets from conversations with the people in the photographs are posted. I think it's a wonderful way to document humanity. It can be found here: Humans of New York.