Transcapitalist

Fighting a losing battle against the rise of sites like U.S. startups 99Designs and Genius Rocket, the No!Spec movement has found some sympathizers internationally. Australian artists are railing against the "worrying precedent" potentially set by their government's new effort to solicit photography contributions from average citizens as part of their campaign to revitalize their tourism marketing.

Nothing Like Australia, the new tourism site features photos sent in from around the country to help would-be tourists get a better sense of the real Australia that they can experience. Professional photographers, meanwhile, are upset that the government is willing to use free photos rather than relying on professional photos, saying,

Refusing to license these photographic works in an appropriate way sends a message that it (government) does not value creative work in the same way as it values other economic assets.

I've been sympathetic to some of the NoSpec! critiques, notably the winner-takes-all approach that encourages quantity over quality design. But the Australian artist response is a bit outrageous: the Australian tourism site is pretty great (better than any comparable city or country tourism campaign that I've seen before) and its strength is surely attibutable to the diversity of the photos submitted by average Australians depicting their way of life (rather than say, perfectly composed sunset and mountain photos typical to such campaigns).

Designers: you are right to demand that your work is properly valued, but pick your battles. In seeking to gain a taste of the diversity of Australia, the crowd of amateurs is more valuable.

Hi GOP, how desperate can you be to attempt to crowdsource your agenda?

America Speaking Out is your attempt to hear the voices of America, but the thoughtless design violates just about every principle of a good community website, featuring pure anonymity, no structure to the "discussion", lame "badges" to reward participation, and zero moderating. The result is a vapid waste, but what did you expect when you failed to put any of your own ideas out there to kickstart a discussion? If you won't take this seriously, neither will the public.

Rep Lungren (R-CA) offers:

House Republicans are offering the country a new set of policy solutions, but rather than handing an agenda down from the Washington DC, we want to include the American people in building it... So to show that the voices of the America people can still make a difference in Washington, we are introducing America Speaking Out and giving citizens a new opportunity to lend their ideas to the creation of a new national policy agenda.

Connecting to the public online to get input is actually a good idea.  But the public isn't here to do your job for you, GOP. A much more effective way to engage would be for you to actually draft a set of policy options, put together the key elements of the agenda, and then let the public comment on, vote on, and prioritize the elements.

Take a page from Less Wrong, one of the best community websites out there. Its model allows writers to compose thoughtfuls piece that are opened to the community for voting (more votes bring it closer to the top) and comments (that are threaded so there is actually a robust discussion). I would love to see Republican leaders compose an opinion piece on each of the elements of their agenda that they then open for annotation and comment.  That's a real way to engage the population in a civil discourse. Soundbites destroy real policymaking; take a moment to write out your argument and post it online. See what ideas stick and which flop. You may be suprised. That would be a discussion worth having.

The adoration of the crowd has really gone too far.

Jeff Howe, of Crowdsourcing fame has "a dream. An idea. A maybe great notion."  He wants everyone on Twitter to read the same book at the same time to form “a massive international book club.” The idea, One Book One Twitter (#1b1t) is modeled after some city programs that took off earlier in the decade and were publicized by local libraries and politicians to encourage, for example, residents of the city of Chicago to read To Kill a Mockingbird in 2002. Howe writes:

“When the program works — and it doesn’t always — it gets more people reading, more people talking and more people generally appreciating the written word. What’s not to like?”

A lot.

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The term alone is mildly disturbing - "human flesh search" - and its application - vigilatism translated from the online to real-life worlds is terrifying. Simulatenously, it may be one of the more impressive examples of crowdsourcing around. Human flesh searches in China have tracked down individuals accused of wrongs ranging from stomping a kitty to death to instigating the suicide of a young woman based solely on images and videos uploaded to the internet. Intensively active chat room users put together the pieces to identify the wanted individuals' identities and place their personal details online for the community to enact its retribution.

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The ascendant tribe is composed of the folks from the open culture/Creative Commons world, the Linux community, folks associated with the artificial intelligence approach to computer science, the web 2.0 people, the anticontext file sharers and remashers and a variety of others. Their capital is Silicon Valley...their favorite blogs include Boing Boing, TechCrunch, and Slashdot, and their embassy in the old country is Wired.

Thus Jaron Lanier describes the "cybernetic totalists" or "digital maoists" whose rising influence Lanier fears is leading us down a path of online culture where appreciation for humanity is displaced by blind trust in technology. In You are Not a Gadget Lanier laments recent trends in the online world - belief in the wisdom of crowds, reliance on algorithms for recommendations rather than people,  mashups and other piecemeal appropriation of others' content, templated web 2.0 designs - and argues that this failure to appreciate individual expression in the web world may have grave consequences for creativity and culture.

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22 hours to go to contribute to the development of "Put This on: A Web Video Pilot About Dressing Like a Grownup," a project crowdsourcing its financing on Kickstarter.  The project is already 264% funded and it's easy to see why.

Donations can be as small as $2 (with the reward of a warm and fuzzy feeling) to $50 (to receive funding credit in the video) to $250 (earning a personal style consultation with the project's creator), and beyond. No one has taken up the $250 offer, although it is creative rewards like that that make this site so fun to browse.

Contribute to an artist's dream project + concretely share in the experience. So cool.