Just came across this post at The Tao of Mac, here’s an excerpt:

After all, why bother coding overly complex solutions that will never work when you can get people to scratch your itch and have fun in the process?

I’ve been playing around with the iPod Touch quite a bit, and have built a little Ajax UI that:

• Lets you navigate my entire collection of Dilbert comics by date (or pick a random comic)
• Lets you tag a comic using jQuery goodness
• Lets you browse by tag

Two things, in particular, stood out for me on this one:

1. Using the iTouch is a great example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that we’ve been investigating at BountyUp for a while.
2. Dilbert is “FUN”. Browsing Dilbert on your iTouch is “FUN”. Tagging Dilbert so you can find it again later, is “FUN” - and also provides great value for everyone else. Voila Collaboration, Voila Crowdsourcing.

Like all the rest of the companies working in collaboration tools, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding or any of the other “Social Commerce” domains, the biggest challenge at BountyUp seems to be “Cognition Friction”. Which is a fancy way of saying that people have no idea what we’re talking about.

The best way to address this seems to be by analogy - unfortunately, we’ve yet to find a sufficiently universal analogy, to which all of our current (and future) users can relate. But as I hinted at in a previous post, we’ve been considering the Stock Market.

Why? Whether the participants realize it or not, it’s a massively collaborative experiment in Social Commerce - with literally MILLIONS of strangers pooling their funds to support (and capitalize on) companies around the world. In fact, it’s the closest thing to BountyUp that exists.

Here are the gaps:

1. In the stock market, you invest in companies as a whole. With BountyUp, you invest directly in the project or product you’re interested in.
2. The stock market can only be used for investing - BountyUp can be used for investing, purchasing, or donating.
3. Investments in the stock market are immediately at risk - BountyUp pledges are actually incentives, not true investments. The upside is that they’re never at risk - if the product or project is not completed, you get your funds back. The downside - you have no claim to company returns that are outside of the Bounty contracts.
4.  There’s no “tool” (outside of the Annual General Meeting) to chat with other investors in the Stock Market. BountyUp provides a forum as well as a marketplace.

On second thought, perhaps this analogy is reaching a bit. What do think? Can you think of a simpler, better way to explain what crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is, and how to do it?

I’ll be attending the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver this weekend - if you’d like to chat about BountyUp, Social Commerce, or anything Collaboration related, feel free to track me down! I’ll look something like this:

Except probably without the burger.

In other words, I’m soliciting constructive criticism. For the most part, I’ll be excerpting the more analytical, expository bits. The places in which I make arguments to which some, perhaps many, will take exception. At least I hope that’s the case. Today’s a bit more of a lark: A story.

Jeff Howe is soliciting feedback in advance of the release of his new book (titled, aptly enough, “Crowdsourcing”). I’m a little disappointed by his description of the structure of the book - he’s chosen to focus on what, in my mind, is a fairly narrow view of the “power of the crowd”, specifically around amateurism. This is ignoring entirely the power of projects such as Idea Crossing and Innocentive, which focus on crowdsourcing the most qualified experts, as well as the range of crowdfunding activities (ChipIn, BountyUp, Crowdfunder, etc.)

But the quality of his prose is fantastic, and he’s really captured the “insider’s feel”. What’s ironic is that, as he tells it, successful crowdsourcing always focuses on a strong sense of community, of belonging - which is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “crowd”. Maybe he should have called it tribesourcing instead.

Tags: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, bountyup, jeffhowe, tribesourcing

There’s a lot going on in the crowdfunding / crowdsourcing world, from our very own “One Human Family” recording bounty, to a cutting edge british filmmaker who’s using the ideas (and the cash) of his fans to produce a feature film - which he’ll then give away under a Creative Commons license.

Check it out: http://aSwarmOfAngels.com/ .

If you’ve been using the passion of your fans to drive forward your own creative projects, why not share your story with us, by leaving a comment below.

Tags: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, fanfunding, filmmaking, bountyup

Gradually I’ve had to accept a simple fact - I am not the norm. “Ordinary” people don’t sit around in the early morning, drinking organic earl-grey tea and thinking about the impossible things they’d like to accomplish, by pooling the funds of millions of strangers around the world. Or do they?I had a simple epiphany last week - what’s the largest example of social finance on the planet?(Hint: you’ll never guess.)

The stock market.

Oh, sure, no one thinks about it that way. But it’s true - millions of strangers, of disparate backgrounds and resources, pooling funds to drive forward the projects that they believe in. Now, their belief is a simple, one-sided thing: they believe the projects will make money. But that’s a good start, don’t you think?

What lessons could we draw upon from the history of the stock market, that might prove useful in moving forward the World’s first open “stake market”? According to wikipedia, trading was first institutionalized to manage the debts of agricultural communities, and then later extended to government debts as well. However, it was not until the Dutch East India Company issued the first corporate stocks and bonds in 1602, that the current form of the stock market was established, whereby common shareholders had interest in a share of the profits (or losses) of the business venture.

IANAH (I am not a historian), but this looks to me like a simple pattern of trust and reputation, extending from transactions with known and trusted locals, to the implicitly trusted “government” and then eventually to the anonymous “corporations”, lured by possibilities of greater returns.

Now here’s a subtlety that I may have been mistaken about when we first set out on this grand adventure - the Stock Market is driven by the sellers. In fact, the reality is that any newly launched security needs a “market maker” to create demand for it - literally, manufacturing interest. And so far, this has been proven out at BountyUp as well - our most active and successful early bounties have all been reverse bounties, started by those who intend to close them - in essence, driven by the sellers.

As much as this disappoints my philosophical desire to see buyers rise up and draw from the market, the goods that they truly want, I’m pragmatic enough to call a spade a spade. Expect to see more robust support for reverse bounties in the near future.

There are a few slightly pernicious bugs that have cropped up recently.

Firstly, some of the time (which, of course, is why it’s hard to fix) new pledges aren’t showing up on the Bounty page. Our callback to PayPal seems to be error-ing out. I’m on it, and I’ll let you know when we’ve posted a fix. (We’re not losing any pledge data, btw. It’s the approval status check - which I’m reconciling by hand every few hours.)

Second, yesterday’s fix on the “Real Gifts” facebook app (for the next/prev buttons) has broken Amazon Search. I know what’s happened there, and I’ll patch it as soon as I finish up the PayPal one.

Finally, I’ve put together a primitive single-sign-on solution between the Blog, the Forums, and the Main Site. Which is cool. But you’ll probably notice two side effects: 1. You can’t register for an account at the Blog or Forum sites, you need to register at the Main site and then come back. 2. You can’t log out without closing your browser. (Sub-domain vs. parent-domain cookie issues, I think). This seems low-priority to me at the moment, so it’ll probably be a day or two before I get to this one.

BountyUp is essentially a tool that facilitates collaborative commerce. Traditionally we have had private goods, which have a subjective value to us and to which we can also ascribe some sort of monetary value. Examples of this would be: an ice cream cone, a car, a plane, or a building; all of which we can define a value for, and then determine if we want to buy it or not.

On the other side of the spectrum of goods have been the public goods, for which we also have a subjective value, but which are too large or nebulous for us to accurately attribute a monetary value. Examples of these would be: clean air, a legal system, space exploration and parks. All of these are goods that we want, but nothing to which, as individuals, we are able to ascribe a monetary value. Traditionally, again, we have paid taxes and elected people who, presumably, know where these funds should be directed in order to meet the needs of the general population.

BountyUp has created one of the first tools for a marketplace that addresses what I’d like to refer to as “a semi-public” (or semi-private) good. An organization such as NASA that can define the success metrics of any particular task (in the form of a Bounty) and put money on the table, allowing any other organization to add to the Bounty. If NASA, for example, starts a Bounty for setting up a station on the moon, then anybody could contribute towards that particular success metric (designing a particular type of rover, or engine, or camera) and individuals or institutions can contribute, knowing that if the Bounty is not completed by a particular deadline, everybody gets their money back.

Or say you want a park with a place for your children to play. You might want to put 50 bucks down for a park with certain dimensions and a swing set. Well, people with children in your city might also feel that they would like to, essentially buy a park for 50 dollars. Get 10,000 people together, and you have a half-million dollar Bounty. A real estate developer can buy a piece of property, plant some grass, put in a swing-set - and collect the Bounty. What if the city put in the park, and collected the Bounty? They could even put some money towards a Bounty for a mass-transit system, or a sewage treatment plant, or anything else - and the people that value that, can contribute towards that Bounty. Crowdfunding as a fully distributed, decentralized method of acquiring semi-public goods - that, themselves, are crowdsourced for delivery? Yes, governments of the world… you too can evolve.

It’s finally time to announce it - we have several facebook apps in beta. Hurray!

The most fully-featured, by far, is one called “Real Gifts“. It’s intended to be the simplest, most digestible example of collaborative commerce possible - a bunch of friends working together to buy each other really cool birthday gifts.

Today I finished some integration with the Amazon API, so that users can pick the gifts they want out of the Amazon store. I used Facebook’s “Mock AJAX” features, and I learned a few things very quickly.

• Put your dummy forms at the top of the page. Why? I had attempted to put my dummy form inside the content that gets refreshed via AJAX call - which doesn’t work the second time.
• Tricks for the “Loading…” message - while the instructions on the wiki are pretty good, there is a delicate art to the placement of the loading div itself. It needs to be within the content that’s being refreshed. For some reason, I’m still getting orphaned “Loading…” divs occasionally - not sure why. (I’ve put a clicktotoggle on the same link as the clicktorewrite attributes.)
• It seems obvious, but make sure you’re not using apps.facebook.com-based URLs for your AJAX calls. The frame, etc. that gets packed onto the content will DEFINITELY get in your way.
• Nesting of AJAX-returned content works fine - as long as all the fake forms you’ll ever need are outside of that content.

Oh, and a final tip - if you write a form that submits file content (multipart), don’t try and post it to an apps.facebook.com-based URL. It won’t work. Simply post it to your own server directly, and make sure you handle the form content before calling require_frame() or require_login().

Inconvenience - Life Racing to Zero Impact

I wrote this as a personal blog, simply because I wanted to cast it around for feedback before making it any sort of official BountyUp project. Of course, I quickly realized I’ve got a lot more subscribers HERE than I do at my personal blog, so we might as well garner feedback here. What do you think - a reasonable idea?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: liferace, environment, inconvenience, carbon, bountyup