Designing Innovations
Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment » Nieman Journalism Lab
The Guardian set up a crowdsourcing mechanism to cull through thousands (millions) of expense line items from the MP expense scandal. A pretty amazing creative feat from concept to execution. Here are some short learnings:
- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun (the sorting of expenses went in 4 simple categories and there was a leader board to track progress)
- Public attention is fickle, so launch immediately (no time for load testing, etc, build/launch in a week. Live QA. Fun times!)
- Speed is mandatory, so use a framework (stand on the shoulders of giants;they used the Django Python framework)
- Participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready (they used Amazon EC2 cloud hosting to get around corporate procurement timelines)
MoMA’s WiFi audio tours, formatted for iPod Touch/iPhone
MoMA’s Customer 404 Not Found Page
“ we artificially never grew, and that turned out to be one of the best ideas I ever had
Stefan Sagmeister, interviewed on Graphic Design on the Radio
Good advice from Jason Santa Maria about sketchbooks, and a Flickr group to share a page from your own sketchbook.
(via Veer’s “The Skinny”)
“ It’s OK to head out for Wonderful. But on your way to Wonderful, you’re gonna have to pass through Alright. And when you get to Alright, take a good look around and get used to it, cuz that may be as far as you’re gonna go.
(via ianspalter)
