Hey, thank you for your questions and interest. You are absolutely right, crowdsourcing or let's say – triggering of the crowd wisdom is a hell of the task. We knew this before we decided to start the project, but we believe it is worth. I will try to explain what we plan to do, and why we want to do it as shorter as I can.
Crowdsourcing is here. It happens every day but on the very rudimentary level in general. I have the feeling that technology is above us all at this moment. We have great applications around, but we still not use their full potential. It is like you have an army of Storm Troopers armed with lightsabers. They will probably use them, but not effective as Jedi (forgive my Star Wars analogy). If we look at the crowdsourcing as The Force, every Steemian is Force sensitive. Every account can perform crowdsourcing activities trough content creation or voting, and how they will look depends exclusively on them. Unfortunately, they are mostly mechanic – simple contests, etc. We have to push people to discover more and find out that they can do almost everything. It is proved that money is not the only satisfaction even in 2.0 concepts. People love to be part of greater stories, to play their role along with the popular community members, etc. Money should be viewed as the catalyst, not the main reason for participation. But if we create contexts which put the mechanism this way (send this – win that, tell me why and I will reward you, etc) nothing will change. Look at your post – it is a perfect example of what we would like to see here. You actually also promised reward – but your reward is my satisfaction because you asked for our opinion, and stated that it can change something. Crowd ideas.
We are fully aware this will not happen overnight. We have to help people to unleash the full potential of their ideas, to see the world out of the box. We made contact with bloggers who are launching offline galleries, plan to make a movie, build villages, launch apps…and everything happened in less than a month. We are ready to put our knowledge to help them develop the concepts which would trigger the crowd attention in the best way possible. When our witness becomes more efficient, or when we raise more delegations or grow our curation trail – we will probably be able to support them more. It is not about crowdfunding – it is about crowd creating. Brainstorming. Collective creative madness which will reach offline users and bring them here. So we are still not talking about the tools, but hard work along with the manual curation.
If we manage to grow the interest and community – we will go to the next phase, the creation of our app. At this moment we know it should be a synthesis of learning materials (like online courses) and participative mechanisms (project calls, collaboration sections, etc). In this way, we believe it can attract stakeholders while never losing its focus – empowering the wisdom of the Crowds on Steem blockchain. We are not developers so this is one more obstacle on our road – but we will find the way. But if we don’t build something before that, our platform has no purpose – it will be another half dead space which cries for delegation.
I believe that communities could be a huge step forward this, whenever it happens. Hashtags are not enough, because they only group similar posts. And comments alone are not able to achieve the long-term discussions or collaborations.
OK, I have to stop now. Sorry for the long answer.
@hidden84