Crowdsourcing content strategy success stories
Tony Chung
people there are still attached to their content. They're not really
interested in letting go of the words in order to focus on the bigger
picture. But I know this group knows better.
A quick Google search finds sites owned by Jeff Howe, Wikipedia, and
several examples of contests, funding, polls, and marketing-related
sites. Apart from these, however, has anyone had success with any
crowdsourcing venture that they wouldn't mind sharing, for possible
inclusion in an online article about Crowdsourcing?
Thanks in advance,
-Tony
=== original TechWr-L post here ===
Help me out here. Crowdsourcing is just multi sourcing, right? Which
implies there should be a content strategy bent to it. But how does
one manage the "deliverables" if you as a technical writer can neither
control nor predict the source material?
One of my first technical writing roles was as one of a small group of
writers that supported a thousand technical SMEs. We focused more on
templates to facilitate reuse, and let the SMEs fill in the details
from their wiki notebooks. The manuals were a byproduct of curation,
restructuring, editing, and collation.
It was hard enough to do this in Word. But with all the talk about
Crowdsourcing out there, I'm curious if anyone has explored this to
any degree of success?
What are your thoughts about the purpose (or lack thereof) of
Crowdsourcing? What platforms have you tried? What are some pitfalls
to watch out for?
And why does my iPhone insist on capitalizing the word Crowdsourcing?
Cheers?
-Tony
Tom Johnson
-Tony
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Janet Swisher
When it comes to content, I kinda hate the term "crowdsourcing". As my
colleague Matt Thompson says, "Crowds aren't smart. Communities of
peers are." That's why I prefer the term "community-generated
content", even though it's a mouthful.
The site that I work on, Mozilla Developer Network
(https://developer.mozilla.org) is a mixture of professional and
community-generated content, some of it dating back to the Netscape
era. I would say that it's pretty successful, in that it's one of
best-regarded sources of information on Web technology.
I have given few presentations related to this at various conferences,
which you can see on my Slideshare page:
http://www.slideshare.net/janetswisher/presentations
I find that, in general, if you need specific content by a specific
date, your best bet is to pay someone to do it. That's why we have
paid staff for MDN. However, payment could take the form of "bounties"
on particular topics. We haven't done that on MDN, but are considering
it. "Bug bounties" have a long history in open source.
Payment can take other forms than money. We give away swag to reward
contributors, but as thank-you, not as a quid pro quo.
Then there's the possibility of "gamification", which is another term
I kinda hate. You can use points and badges to recognize and reward
contributions. However, I recommend being very careful, to ensure that
the rewards don't undermine motivation rather than enhance it, and
that they encourage desirable behaviors. I've shied away from adding
this to MDN until such time as we can be sure we're doing it well, and
not doing more harm than good. Ideally, you want to tap into the
positive emotional qualities that make games motivating without
necessarily turning your site into a game. On this topic, I recommend
Jane McGonigal's book "Reality is Broken", and her site:
http://gameful.org/blog/2010/10/10/what-is-gameful/
You can also do a campaign where you rally your community around a
topic area or need. For example, on MDN we are working on adding
browser compatibility tables to Web technology reference pages, and
making the text browser-neutral, rather than Firefox-focused. However,
we have a ton of reference pages, we've been plugging away at it for a
year and quarter, and we're not nearly done. (We also have lots of
content that is appropriately Firefox-specific.)
That assumes, of course, that you have a community to rally. As Tom
mentioned, community-building requires a lot of individual
interaction. Communities are made of relationships, and relationships
require work. However, as the community grows, ideally people are
interacting with each other, not just with you, the "community
manager" (or "community steward" as we are known at Mozilla). As the
community matures, you can empower experienced members to mentor newer
contributors, as well as take on some administrative responsibilities.
Community management is a whole nother area of practice, with lots of
social-media-guru hoo-ha to wade through. I find that the Online
Community Guide blog has a pretty good stream of content on the
subject: http://www.feverbee.com/
I'm happy to answer other questions, and to be quoted in your article
(even if you stick with "crowdsourcing" as the topic (-: )
Cheers,
Janet
Seth Grimes
different people may not share the same reasons for belonging to a crowd,
nor the same backgrounds or goals. That's a good property. Diversity can
mean less bias and greater usability and accuracy of whatever you
discover.
I'm particularly interested in, and intrigued by, crowd-sourced sentiment
analysis and have included several speakers on that topic in my next
conference.
Seth
--
Seth Grimes gri...@altaplana.com +1 301-270-0795 @sethgrimes
Alta Plana Corp, analytics strategy consulting, http://altaplana.com
Sentiment Analysis Symposium, May 8 NYC, http://sentimentsymposium.com
Tony Chung
On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Tom Johnson <t...@idratherbewriting.com> wrote:
> I'm involved in a unique crowdsourcing effort right now. I have about 100
> volunteers who have signed up for the LDSTech Blog and Wiki project.
Thanks for being the very first respondent to my attempt at
crowdsourcing on two lists. I should have known you would have
responded first - you've always been ahead of the game.
> If you look at this page, http://tech.lds.org/wiki/LDS.org_getting_started_guides, you'll
> see near the bottom I have a Word template for a Getting Started guide. I've
> had four different volunteers create good-looking getting started guides
> using this template.
I can appreciate that by providing templates, you are being proactive
to control the risk of haphazard document structures. BTW that is the
cleanest look for a MediaWiki site I have ever seen. I like the way
you combine the best of tools - Joomla! for the website, vBulletin for
the forum, Jira for the bug and task tracking, and MediaWiki for the,
well, wiki.
It looks like you're using it mostly to host documents, so I guess you
don't really need a WYSIWYG editor for MediaWiki. But if you did, I
can share that I installed TinyMCE successfully, but it had the
problem of deleting pages on save when edited in IE7 (the corporate
standard -- don't tell me. Yes, I know).
> In order to be successful, I think you have to engage volunteers on an individual basis.
... and ...
> I've found that crowdsourcing only works if you connect and invite
> people on a personal level, though, or unless you can engage volunteers
> through a self-motivated interest (such as when someone creates a wordpress
> plugin for a need he or she has).
Limited, specific, targeted interviewing always works well, and
invites a lot of useful feedback and contributions. But if a person
has to be asked, then can it still be called crowdsourcing?
> Crowdsourcing is still an art I'm hoping to figure out. I started writing a
> guidebook on this for the ldstech community
> here: http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Community_Project_Handbook.
... and ...
> Crowdsourcing within the lds community may be somewhat unique, since many
> lds members are eager to serve. However, I think with any non-profit or
> open-source effort, such as with Wordpress, you will have a lot of interested
> volunteers who are willing to help out if given direction and guidance.
Did you find that your experience contributing to the WordPress codex
helped with your understanding of how to manage and integrate the
contributions of several disparate users?
>
> Tom
> ---------------------
> blog: idratherbewriting.com
> twitter: tomjohnson
Thanks,
-Tony
Tony Chung
You must have known I'd be targeting you, too!
On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Janet Swisher <jmsw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When it comes to content, I kinda hate the term "crowdsourcing". As my
> colleague Matt Thompson says, "Crowds aren't smart. Communities of
> peers are." That's why I prefer the term "community-generated
> content", even though it's a mouthful.
Funny how in my own little mind-bubble I didn't get the connection at
first between what people are calling "crowdsourcing" and what we've
always known as user-generated content - UGC. CGC provides even more
focus. So thanks for linking the thoughts for me.
> ... Mozilla Developer Network (https://developer.mozilla.org) is a mixture of
> professional and community-generated content, some of it dating back to the
> Netscape era.
Is the level of content you receive from the community of the same
quality or technical level as the internal developers? Another way to
look at this, is, how much effort does it take to massage the
community contributions into the house style? An example I would
compare MDN to is the Drupal documentation project, which has had
several starts and stops over the past number of years.
Drupal developers know it's hard to find information on specific
releases easily, and the community has tried to involve the DITA
community to encourage contributions, but I haven't been following
whether the effort has been successful at all. I just don't notice any
change when I search for stuff.
Just an aside: Did you know there's a QA developer at Mozilla named Tony Chung?
I can't wait to look at your presentations. No time now, but, are the
slides effective without audio?
> http://www.slideshare.net/janetswisher/presentations
> I find that, in general, if you need specific content by a specific
> date, your best bet is to pay someone to do it.
I would believe this opinion to be shared by any number of people. And
then there's Wikipedia.
> [Resource about tapping into the positive emotional qualities that make
> games motivating without being contrived:]
> Jane McGonigal's book "Reality is Broken", and her site:
> http://gameful.org/blog/2010/10/10/what-is-gameful/
Thanks. That's another topic I'd like to address later.
Janet, you gave me a lot to think about, outside the scope of this
article, and more along the lines of my professional development. As
more questions arise I will definitely send them your way.;
Thanks so much,
-Tony
Tony Chung
> Crowds aren't random. They come together for purposes... plural because
> different people may not share the same reasons for belonging to a crowd,
> nor the same backgrounds or goals. That's a good property. Diversity can
> mean less bias and greater usability and accuracy of whatever you discover.
Hi Seth,
This reminds me of a session I attended years ago where the instructor
explained that you cannot motivate anyone to do anything. If a person
does something it is due to their own personal drivers.
I also like that you touched on the universality of content reviewed
by committee. However, as Janet said, if you need some thing by some
time then pay some one. ;-)
> I'm particularly interested in, and intrigued by, crowd-sourced sentiment
> analysis and have included several speakers on that topic in my next
> conference.
I have not heard that term: crowd-sourced sentiment analysis. It
sounds largely academic and outside my area of expertise. I am
primarily experiential, so when I write about crowdsourcing this month
I will be talking about being immersed in the experience.
Thanks for responding,
-Tony
Seth Grimes
I see crowd-sourcing (via platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk) as
work by multiple individuals, working independently. That's different
from work by committee, where the individuals are collaborating and
interacting in some way.
Sentiment analysis has strong academic roots and on-going academic
research, but it finds many real-world applications, as part of
social/online-media analysis, survey analysis, financial-market trading,
and so on. Anyone who wants to learn more could send me a note.
Seth
--
Tony Chung
I meant no disrespect when I used the term "academic". I am fascinated
by the concept of analyzing user motivations, but admittedly don't
have a mind to interpret or study the research.
It's more a case of my being a sculptor rather than an architect.
Can you recommend suitable introductory resources on the topic that I
may mention or link to in my article? I'll be linking to your
conference, but would like to direct people down the right path (or
paths) of existing research on the subject.
Thanks,
-Tony
Anne Gentle
I'd be happy to talk about community sourcing, I too am in the camp
with Janet that says crowdsourcing is a word related to outsourcing,
and that's not what we're doing when we're making content by
collaborating with community members.
The second edition of my book, Conversation and Community: The Social
Web for Documentation, talks about these techniques and has a new
chapter about content strategy and community. In my current job I'm
completely embedded in the community while acting as content
strategist for several open source projects. I've learned a lot in the
last 18 months and have even turned some of my own assumptions around.
I share some of these discoveries in this presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/annegentle/sprints-and-stacks
I'd be happy to talk to you more about successes and pitfalls when
working with communities to collaborate on docs. It isn't quite
crowdsourcing all the time, what I do.
An interesting doc task that is more like crowdsourcing though is what
RedHat does with error message documentation - just ask a TON of
contributors to fill in lots of little forms so that errors get
documented. I learned about that from Lana Brindley at last year's
Open Help Conference (http://openhelpconference.com,
http://justwriteclick.com/2011/06/09/observations-from-the-open-help-conference/).
Or Sarah Maddox's "Doc Blitz" (https://ffeathers.wordpress.com/
2010/12/04/a-blitz-test-of-the-documentation/) where you run a test
blitz of the docs. I ran one for OpenStack and got a comment a minute
from "the crowd" in one hour time period - which was still full of
community members (otherwise they wouldn't have volunteered, without a
known goal to increase the quality of the docs).
What I'm rambling around to say is, crowds of nameless people can do
small doc tasks, communities of collaborators do the bigger doc
tasks.
Does that help you in your quest? Feel free to keep asking questions.
Warmly,
Anne