Ethical Consumer Conference Crowd Sourcing Talk

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Was delivered 23rd September in Manchester, UK

See the slides (with speaker notes) - PDF 9Mb

Conference title: Collecting Data on Companies and Products - the Potential for Civil Society Collaborations
Talk title: Crowd-sourcing websites and ethical rankings.
Audience: Ethical Consumption organisations, NGOs, academics, interested civil society individuals
Duration: 20 mins

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Header salao.jpg
The launch of FIATs crowd source designed car

Contents

Potential questions that this talk could address

Ethical Consumption projects being researched (full podcasts on http://JonathanMelhuish.com)

This is meant to be a quick round-up of the relative differences and interesting characteristics for each project. View the podcasts on http://JonathanMelhuish.com for the full story. If you add a new Ethical Consumption "system" / "project" to this list then we will Skype them, interview them and podcast the video on-line. If you want to help with this then just go ahead and do it and send us the video to publish.

Questions to ask

Better World Shopper (http://www.betterworldshopper.com/)

Dr. Ellis Jones is the author of the Better World Shopping Guide, a handy pocket-sized book about company's ethical performance. The 3rd Edition sold 100 thousand copies. A boiled down phone app is also available.

Ellis points out that the proliferation of ethical consumer information sources and the inconsistencies between them can confuse the consumer.

Alonovo (http://Alonovo.com)

Alonovo uses the Amazon API to allow you to search Amazon for products by proxy and presents them with ethical company information from sources such as KLD Research & Analytics, Inc., Social Accountability International and others. Many of these are for-profit and non-transparent data providers.

George talks about the possibilities of working with other ethical data provider NGOs like fair trade diamond company monitors.

Good Guide (http://goodguide.com)

With several hundred thousand users, mobile phone apps and more than 150,000 products covered, the GoodGuide in the USA is an interesting group to watch. They use researchers and scientists to analyse mostly 3rd party quantitative data to assemble scores on companies in the usual areas of ethics. Their scoring methods are not transparent but their capacity to provide point-of-sale summary information to the user is very advanced.

They are beginning to toy with crowd sourcing by allowing users to query scores and present evidence to compliment theirs but only from the point of view of improving the data, not as a marketing exercise to create and spread involvement.

Bill Pease PhD from GoodGuide suggests that key common data points, like underlying data on political donations, could be standardised and shared but that format standards for general ethics data and scores will, and has consistently been, very difficult to agree on.

Fosfo (http://citizensmarket.org/)

Fosfo (previously known as Citizens Market) is a community-driven web site helping consumers to know which are the best companies to support. Annesley interviewed Stephane de Messieres from Fosfo.

Stephane told us that Fosfo team have always had the attitude that expert-driven models are absolutely required for good benchmarking and strong analysis on the largest companies BUT those organisations will always find it hard to have comprehensive coverage that includes smaller brands – so that’s where crowdsourcing comes in. Fosfo allows users to review any company, right down to small local stores. In theory, a single site could combine both approaches, but in practise it might be difficult because the organisational culture is necessarily very different. A key differentiator of Fosfo is their focus on building their community, including experimenting with offline events such as game-testing the mechanics of their site.

Stephane agrees that there’s a need to constantly focus on expanding beyond the “core niche” and engaging more ethical consumers.

He believes that although there’s a lot of useful third-party sources out there, but it’s important not just to “scrape” the data but instead to encourage your community to cultivate and support these data sources.

Stephane points out that taking a purely information-driven approach suffers from a huge chicken-and-egg problem: users won’t contribute to an empty site because initially they won’t believe in it. But if there’s a playful, social element, that can be a motivator, right from the start.

Like many projects in our field, Fosfo is struggling to make the organisation work financially and is currently looking at how they can continue by scaling back on staff. We wish them the best of luck with that and look forward to collaborating in the future!

Ethical Consumer (http://ethicalconsumer.org)

Ethical Consumer are the longest standing organisation in this area. They use the common expert researcher model with copying of 3rd party journalism combined with primary research. They concentrate more on directly changing companies through their reputation and links with many other NGOs. They are also looking in to opening up their database for invited NGOs and charities to contribute. As they charge for the data currently they do not feel that a fully open free system is the right path. The primary users of their fully transparent database systems are NGOs rather than individuals.

Ethical Consumer magazine covers an area of products each month, distilled and elaborated on from the database of scored articles. It has a circulation of around 5 thousand and the website has around 40 thousand visits / month.

Unavailable

Non ethical-consumer crowd sourcing systems being researched

List obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects (86 entries). These projects have been selected in order to demonstrate various different characteristics and varied benefits of crowd sourcing (not just data!).

Terms

Australian Historic Newspapers (http://trove.nla.gov.au/) and Transcribe Bentham

Transcribe Bentham is a pioneering crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, which is making available digital images of the vast Bentham Papers collection (c.60,000 manuscript folios) held by University College London via a customised MediaWiki. Anyone, anywhere in the world can transcribe the manuscripts, and encode their work in Text-Encoding Initiative-compliant XML in order to assist the UCL Bentham Project in producing the new and authoritative edition of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and create a freely-accessible and searchable digital repository. Transcribe Bentham was honoured with an Award of Distinction in the 'Digital Communities' category of the 2011 Prix Ars Electronica, the worlds premier digital arts competition. 356 editors, 1386 users, 2000 manuscripts transcribed

Australian Historic Newspapers provided by the National Library of Australia encourages members of the public to correct/fix up/improve the electronically translated (OCR) text of old newspapers. This means the full-text search capability is instantly improved for everyone. This is the first library project in the world that has undertaken crowdsourcing on a large scale. Released 8/2008 -> 4/2010 12,000,000 lines, 1000s of users, 240,000,000 articles uploaded and transcribed

Cerberus

can be defined as an automated processing engine to translate any type of photographic satellite data into usable GIS data by harnessing the power of the crowd. In the form of an interactive computer game players get to process photographs where they have to mark interesting features like river deltas on Mars, the evolution of glaciers on Earth and so on. Cerberus as a game is equipped with an extensive learning experience in order to ready the players to do the job. Because of this Cerberus serves three important factors within the space business which are E-learning, Outreach and Crowdsourcing. no data on usage

Greenpeace, Half Bakery (http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Poo_20textured_20toilet_20bowl)

Half Bakery has crowd sourced half baked ideas with voting.

Greenpeace crowd sourced the design of the anti-BP campaign logo. several thousand people sent in logos. They then continued to not crowd source the rest of the campaign.

There are an enourmos number of sites that crowd source and community filter ideas, many of which have large followings

The Guardian's investigation into the MP Expense Scandal, BlueServo

BlueServo is a free website which crowdsources surveillance of the Texas-Mexico border through live camera streams over the Internet. This evolved from an initiative taken by the State of Texas, which announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border, to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents. Blue Servo: 28,000,000 hits and 2,780 reports of suspicious activity in 4 week pilot period

Guardian (2009): Over 20,000 people examined 700,000 expense-claim documents

IBM, Unilever, Coventry

Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack food brand Peperami since 1993, but has decided to submit their brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives.

IBM collected over 37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees and their family members in 2006.

Since 2001, IBM has used jams to involve its more than 300,000 employees around the world in far-reaching exploration and problem-solving. ValuesJam in 2003 gave IBM's workforce the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values for the first time in nearly 100 years. During IBM's 2006 Innovation JamTM - the largest IBM online brainstorming session ever held - IBM brought together more than 150,000 people from 104 countries and 67 companies. As a result, 10 new IBM businesses were launched with seed investment totaling $100 million.

Jams are not restricted to business. Their methods, tools and technology can also be applied to social issues. In 2005, over three days, the Government of Canada, UN-HABITAT and IBM hosted Habitat Jam. Tens of thousands of participants - from urban specialists, to government leaders, to residents from cities around the world - discussed issues of urban sustainability. Their ideas shaped the agenda for the UN World Urban Forum, held in June 2006. People from 158 countries registered for the jam and shared their ideas for action to improve the environment, health, safety and quality of life in the world's burgeoning cities.

Coventry: CovJam, a collaborative online conversation held by Coventry City Council and IBM, and participated by around 900 residents, businesses, and public sector bodies. The three-day ‘Jam’, which is being presented by IBM as a new method of online citizen engagement, generated over 2,000 posts and forms part of the Council’s drive towards making Coventry a ‘smarter city’ over the next 20 years.

Juratis, Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/)

Juratis is a US based legal crowd sourcing site. Voting and Reputation are used, as usual, to ensure quality. Launched 2011: 573 users growing at 300% / month

Kiva facilitate direct loans to 3rd world entrpeuners missing out the charity middle-man. 27,000 lenders lent $2,500,000 this week

Life in a Day, OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the world. Satelite images are provided and the crowd overlays information on them through an editor. This community driven map pays greater attention to things like cycle and wheelchair access. 1,000,000 editors, 1,000,000,000 nodes (things); 100,000,000 ways (roads) and expanding rapidly

Life in a Day is Kevin Macdonald's 95-minute documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips (4500 hours) submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day. Yumi Goto of TIME LightBox remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it’s the first crowdsourced, user-generated content to hit the big screen."

SeeClickFix, Ushahidi

SeeClickFix is a web tool that allows citizens to report non-emergency neighborhood issues, which are communicated to local government, as a form of community activism. It has an associated free mobile phone application. In Anula, Australia (population 2,400) over the last 6 months there are 507 reports.

Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map.

Open Source Software, Wikipedia, Communism, Open Hardware project, Citizen Journalism

extremely technical and widely regarded as higher quality. Apple is based on OSS. Wikipedia has enormous numbers of extremely detailed scientific information pages e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapomorphy

Wikipedia: 144,000 active editors, reviewers, moderators (edit in last month); 25,000,000 total (+talk) pages; 4,000,000 content pages; 1,000,000,000th page edit = 4/2010

Blogging: 4,000,000 blogs (2010); 9,000 citizen editors http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ = 9,400,000 unique visitors in 9/2011, more than WashingtonPost for the first time

Not relevant

Gaming

Recently there has been increasing interest in "gamification", the application of game mechanics to increase user engagement and viral spread. Note that this does not necessarily mean that the systems need to be light-hearted.

4square (https://foursquare.com/)

Suffers from chicken and egg: the core value of the service ("find out which friends are nearby") will only happen when the service has achieved critical mass and lots of users are checking in regularly. In the meantime well thought out strategies encourage people to check-in and continually want to improve. People become "mayor" of a place if they check in most often. 10,000,000 users, Check-ins per day: Over 3 million, with over 750 million check-ins total

Analysis of findings

Feel free to begin analysis before everyone is interviewed. All thoughts welcome.

Characteristics (or components) of existing Ethical Consumption projects

Motivations to get involved in crowdsourcing

Relevant potentialy useful outputs from crowd sourcing

Other thoughts

Possible Talk Introductions

Creating change

The aim is to radically change human society for the better. Ethical Consumption will be able do this if:

Ethical consumption projects so far have concentrated on the provision of information by expert researchers, assuming or hoping, that a critical mass of consumers will take part if the information can be provided in a good enough way to facilitate their existing desire to consume ethically. So far none of the 20+ projects, some of them highly funded and with all the gizmos, have got even a small number (relative to the amount needed to achieve the aim) of people to regularly use their systems.

Changes in the way that people interact with information over the past 10 years have created new opportunities to structure these projects in a way that creates the desire in consumers to get involved and virally get others involved. These changes however, are difficult to understand for most as they turn centuries of hierarchical organisation upside down, challenging our very notion of who we are and where we fit in.

Crowd sourcing is about understanding

There are thousands of examples of failed crowdsourcing attempts, but there's also some major success stories. What is it that makes these crowdsourced projects successful? And does this present any opportunities for us?

We are going to present 21 success stories from the 86 we found that we think best demonstrate the enormous variety of situations, crowd motivations and outcomes. We'd also like to hear your knowledge in the area at the end of the talk.

Some (leading and rhetorical) questions

Possible Talk Conclusions

Crowd sourcing has many benefits

All of the organisations that implement crowd sourcing benefit from extensive free marketing, and support from all the new hyper-engaged crowd advocates. This radically increases the sale of its other products.

There are no examples of successful crowd-sourced general Ethical Consumption organisations yet. Fosfo, ex-citizensMarket in the US, is attempting 100% crowd-sourcing but has only just started. GoodGuide has just under 1 million users and is looking in to greater crowd-sourcing. They currently invite users to submit qualitative evidence to suplement GoodGuides scientifically researched quatitative 3rd party purchased metrics data.

If anyone wants more information, full video interviews of Alonovo, BetterWorldShopper, Fosfo, GoodGuide are all available online and also more metrics on all the crowd-sourcing mentioned today.

Does anyone have any information they would like to add about crowd-sourcing

Actual talk (cards)

1

Hi, I'm Annesley, this is Jonathan. We've been researching crowd-sourcing and its relevance to ethical consumption.

There are thousands of examples of failed crowdsourcing attempts, but there's also some major success stories. What is it that makes these crowdsourced projects successful? And does this present any opportunities for us?

We are going to briefly present 21 success stories from the 86 we found that we think best demonstrate the enormous variety of situations, crowd motivations and outcomes. We'd like to hear your experiences of crowd-sourcing at the end of the talk.

2

Australian Historic Newspapers encourages members of the public to correct electronically translated (OCR) text of old Australian newspapers. Over 2 years 1000s of people corrected and peer-reviewed 12,000,000 lines of text and 240,000,000 articles were uploaded and transcribed.

UCLs Transcribe Jeremy Bentham project is very similar. 356 editors have transcribed 2000 of the 60,000 manuscripts uploaded by UCL so far.

These 2 projects illistrate the power of the Internet to connect people with very niche interests who are prepared to put enormous amounts of energy in to a very specific area of interest.

3

The Guardian's investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in 2009 was crowd sourced: Over 20,000 people examined 700,000 expense-claim documents.

BlueServo crowdsources surveillance of the Texas-Mexico border through live camera streams over the Internet. In its 4 week pilot period it had 28,000,000 people visiting the site and just under 3,000 reports of suspicious activity.

These projects demonstrate the sort of varied emotions that you can tap in to as motivators. People get very addicted to this type of data analysis. It is a form of "Treasure Hunt".

4

Cerberus uses crowd-sourcing to translate photographic satellite data. In the form of an interactive computer game players get to process photographs where they have to mark interesting features like river deltas on Mars, the evolution of glaciers on Earth and so on.

Like most games, Cerberus is largely about learning, a process which can be very enjoyable. It involves an extensive learning period in order to prepare the players for actually performing the task. This progressive learning challenge is a great way to engage and retain users.

5

Greenpeace crowd-sourced the design of their anti-BP campaign logo. Tens of thousands people sent in designs. Appealing to someones sense of creativity is a powerful way to get people involved.

Traditional models of organisation can become very limited to one demographic preventing a movement from expanding. Crowd-sourcing and its implicit respect for members can cross demographic boundaries by accesing alternative ways of communicating a message allowing the movement to expand out to new audiences.

6

IBM brought together more than 150,000 people from 104 countries and 67 companies for an innovation Jam. As a result, 10 new IBM businesses were launched with seed investment totaling $100 million.

This demonstrates how crowd-sourcing represents the breaking up of normal hierarchies and the view of people and workers as dumb animals allowing only "experts" to make high level decisions, carry complex research or achieve training. Again, it is crucial to understand that IBM not only gained ideas from the crowd, but hugely improved its employee and customer engagement, respect and sense of belonging with the company. An enormously successful marketing exercise.

7

Juratis crowd-sources legal answers to visitors questions. Voting and Reputation gaming techniques are used, as usual, to ensure the quality of answers. Launched in mid 2011 it has 573 users and is growing by 300% / month.

Kiva facilitate direct loans to 3rd world entrpeuners missing out the charity middle-man. 3rd world entrpeuners advertise their business and what they need and people lend directly to them. 27,000 lenders lent $2,500,000 this week.

These projects demonstrate people connecting, missing out the experts, and helping each other directly with a great deal of trust.

8

OpenStreetMap is a free map of the world like Google Maps. Satelite images are provided and the crowd overlays information on them through an editor. 1,000,000 editors have overlayed 1,000,000,000 things and 100,000,000 roads and is expanding very rapidly.

This project demonstrates the need to complete community systems with your particular piece of knowledge. I put on the postbox in my street on to it. Many people increasingly are also beginning to reject being dictated to by experts and enjoy being the primary source of expertise themselves.

9

Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map. Several countries now have Ushahidi's for reporting police brutality and election issues.

This form of community activism crowd shows how people can be the eyes and ears 1st hand reporting if they have a place to make themselves heard and be respected.

10

Open Source Software, made by the crowd, with extremely niche and technical skills, is widely regarded as much higher quality than the experts can produce. Apple's underlying system is Unix, the Open Source Software operating system. The intense level of constant peer review of Open Source Software causes it to improve dramatically and very importantly become extremely secure. Microsoft, the experts, do not benefit from massive peer review or the respect and extreme loyalty of the IT community and thus produce dramatically less secure software.

Wikipedia, which has enormous numbers of extremely detailed scientific information pages, has 144,000 active editors, reviewers, moderators ; 25,000,000 total pages; 4,000,000 content pages. The 1,000,000,000th page edit happened in April 2010. There are many gaming elements in Wikipedia including status levels and notifications, to keep the user addicted.

Citizen Journalism or Blogging: 4,000,000 blogs (2010); 9,000 citizen editors produce the Huffington Post with 9,400,000 unique visitors this month it has overtaken the WashingtonPost standard newspaper for the first time.

All these projects take ownership of the means of production from the "experts" and give it to the masses.

11

4square is a mobile app that let's you know when your friends are nearby. It requires users to register and check-in to a location, shop, cafe, bar, to see who is near them. To offer any real value to the user, it needs a significant critical mass. Although It has 10,000,000 users, 750 million places registered in total and over 3 million more per day, many users still don't get any real value from the core service - but they are still motivated to check in regularly through a clever system of rewards: points, badges and status.

Its success is almost entirely due to good implementation of game theory.

12

All of the organisations that implement crowd sourcing benefit from extensive free marketing, and support from all the new engaged crowd advocates.

We also interviewed 5 Ethical Consumption organisations. GoodGuide has just under 1 million users, a popular mobile phone app, 150,000 product database compiled by a team of researchers. They are heavily venture capital funded and use primarily 3rd party; quantitative; for-profit; non-transparent; data sources. GoodGuide do not use crowd-sourcing and are aware that they will need to increase the size of their marketplace in order to be effective.

Fosfo, on the other hand, is completely crowd-sourced and certainly has a great understanding of all the gaming and design aspects to make it a success but is new and currently has no funding.

Fosfo believes that they can create and grow a marketplace for ethical consumption by designing an addictive, open and engageing platform for people to communicate on. This includes concepts of:

13

If anyone wants more information, full video interviews of Alonovo, BetterWorldShopper, Fosfo, GoodGuide are all available online and also more metrics on all the crowd-sourcing mentioned today.

Does anyone have any information they would like to add about crowd-sourcing.

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