Hey, @krnel!
Thank you for your contribution to the crowd. We are the Steemit project dedicated to empowering The Wisdom of Crowds. You can find more about us on our official website or whitepaper and you can support us by voting for our witness and joining our curation trail on Steemauto . We are also inviting you to join Crowdmind Discord server. Don't forget to use the #crowdmind hashtag and happy crowdsourcing!
Additional comment:
We would really like to see the awakened crowd. Now, we know this sounds strange but we will try to explain.
Remember web 2.0, and everything happened after that? It started with blogs and different content creation options, then we got social media, crowdsourcing was born, and we all meet its most beautiful daughter crowdfunding. All of these platforms were harvesting the wisdom of the crowds with small or none value returning. And all of these platforms were simple crowdsourcing tools provided by the middleman.
Now, on Steem – crowdsourcing is not the core function of the platform as a tool, but a unique ability of its users. The Crowd. We can crowdfund with upvotes, ask for ideas in every post and comment section, brainstorm, create something together, solve problems…name it – we can do it.
But people still don’t recognize it. While we manually curating we see the same patterns – great posts with rewards but few or no comments at all, or contests with prizes which fails to trigger deeper participation than -submit and win. We believe that people can raise their participation levels, and it can benefit the whole ecosystem. So our answer is – we don’t need new functions, we need to empower each other and create the critical mass which would take participation on the next level. And then, there would be new and meaningful proposals, new projects, platforms, and general value growth.
And this is the picture of future Steem. Today, we can say that online space is a natural extension of our living environment, while any decision in offline regime can get its online reflection and vice versa. So we see Steemit as our extended living environment, the place which harnesses the collective intelligence in so many ways. For example, people in Hungary can show us how they build their homeless shelter, I can see their plan and raise the money to build it in Serbia + get others expertise in a few clicks/posts. Or we can solve the complex scientific problem while rewarding every crowd participant for contribution – and it is forever written in the blockchain. This is just the first couple of things which crossed my mind… So, sorry for the long answer and thank you for this question! We need brainstormings like this.
Best regards
@hidden84
Interesting. How do yo increase participation? The concept of sourcing from the crowd is interesting but complex. How to make tools to facilitate it? What does it look like?
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