Crowdsourcing a Film: Are you In or Out?

As Matt Hanson, director of the crowd funded, open sourced upcoming film called “A Swarm of Angels” says, you have to “dig through a lot of dirt to find the diamonds.” That’s basically what’s wrong with a lot of social media sites today. From YouTube to blogs, you have to spend a lot of time in the mine before the jewels are revealed.

During the research phase of our upcoming class presentation for CutLab, I looked at a lot of mundane, although highly rated, videos on YouTube. Many of these “honored” clips were basically shaky-cam, unfocused, and, to me, somewhat pointless. Who has time to watch all this stuff? Although the services offered by YouTube and other online video sites are a great resource, and for many a source of great entertainment, having to dig through the dirt makes me wish there was a better gatekeeper acting as a filter.

So this experience leads me to wonder whether the “crowd” has the wisdom to make the best possible film of “Angels.” As Stephen Spielberg once said (and I paraphrase), if there was a magic formula for making hit movies, I’d use it and release a killer production once a year. So, while my logic might be a little off, I ask, if one of the greatest, most experienced directors in the world can’t figure out how to make a sure-fire blockbuster, how will the wisdom of a not-so-experienced crowd come up with something that’s good?

The concepts behind the open sourced filmmaking venture are good ones: for a 25 pound subscription fee (around $50 US) the participants have input into a film script, and may potentially get paid work on the actual production. The logic behind the subscription fee is good: People are more invested emotionally in something they in which they invest their hard-earned cash. And, another concept I especially like is the letting the subscribers download the raw footage to create their own “remixes,” using their individual voices and talent. With 50,000 subscribers at work, something resembling art is sure to emerge.

Hmmm…. On second thought, maybe Matt Hanson is onto something here. I’m in!

When is a Mashup a Smashup?

When people work together for a common goal, rather than just the goal of creating more individual wealth for themselves, good things happen. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams describe such collaborative endeavors as the Human Genome Project, Wikipedia, and even user-created Lego sets. They offer three rules for open source collaboration: “Nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and anybody can improve it.”

The example of the Katrina PeopleFinder project particularly amplifies the good that a self-actualizing creative computing community can accomplish. Here, “three thousand people, lightly coordinated” were able to aggregate information about Katrina victims, and personal messages to those victims, that was popping up in a multitude of places all over the web. These volunteer computer heroes were able to accomplish more in 4 days with a loose, self-made mandate, than the federal government or any other large, bulky, 20th Century institution could have done with millions of dollars in resources and one or two years.

So why is it so hard for institutions to embrace the open collaboration manifested in such success stories like GoldCorp, Wikipedia, The Human Genome Project or PeopleFinder? The record industry, for example, has fiercely opposed the bending of Intellectual Property (IP) laws as they fight against mashups of popular songs. But some argue that allowing sampling would generate renewed interest in many artists who escape current notice due to the plethora of emerging artists.

I recently received a message through a professional list serve that NBC is inviting submissions for a new diversity program. You’re allowed to use images, music, and other elements of NBC shows including The Office, to create a promotional advertisement that promotes diversity in the workplace. This open call advertising contest seems like a good idea on the surface. NBC is releasing its IP for mashups and collaborative filmmaking. The contest is even called WithoutaBox. But some deeper thought on the matter unveils the dark side of the story. Some highly paid creative types employed at either NBC or their advertising partners are being displaced by citizen filmmakers. I simply ask: Does this cross the line from collaboration to exploitation? Are the rights of the NBC staffers being undermined by mashup artists? Are the old rules out the window, smashed to smithereens?

While the motives behind NBC’s contest are not easily determined, I don’t think the efforts of the contestants are all that compelling. The ad agency people shouldn’t worry about being displaced. (Not that I watch very many commercials anymore, having just purchased TiVo.)

There are many instances where collaboration has led to better reporting and greater common good. CNN makes good use of viewer supplied videos and photos in its I-Reports, most recently with the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis. Bloggers have revealed scandals such as the Mark Foley intern debacle and the unveiling of the widespread dismissal of Democrat-friendly U.S. Attorneys. So on the whole is it seems that collaboration even in the media is in the best interests of society at large.

The Power of the Crowd

In their book, Wikinomics, Donald Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams present some intriguing, thought-provoking examples of how mass collaboration is radically transforming the worlds of business, education, and leisure in the early 21st Century.

First, by defining the word wiki (Hawaiian for “fast”), the authors set the stage for the torrent of examples of how myriad companies have used wikis to create value and promote intellectual development on a global scale. Wiki, as pertaining to Wikinomics, is software that enables a number of people to collaborate on documents, software, business problems, etc., over the web. Other useful wikis mentioned include those used in creation of mutual funds, the creation of online textbooks, and the grand dame of them all: Wikipedia.

The best part of Web 2.0, which is based on xml instead of html, is that interactivity becomes paramount to a fulfilling experience. The Net generation, which has been raised on a diet of bits and bites, is hungry for interactive online experiences. Unlike the baby boomers or the Gen-X crowd, who accept the one-way flow of information from the “experts” to the “common people,” the “Net-genners” would like to post comments, vote on their favorite pictures, videos, songs, etc.; converse with others across the globe; and contribute to the online global community with their own points of view through their Facebooks, MySpaces, blogs, vlogs, and the like.

But I digress. We were talking about business, using free agents and creating value. In today’s marketplace, Tapscott and Williams state, openness, peering, sharing and acting globally are the keys to success. An example of one company that found success through just this ideological journey is GoldCorp. After coming to a dead end in its search for gold, the company decided to hold a contest for mining ideas, and in the process released its precious intellectual property to see if the world would answer their call for prospecting help. Sure enough, chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians and others were able to analyze GoldCorp’s geological data in new, ingenious way, leading to the eventual mining of more than 8 million ounces of gold. (The prize money in the contest was $575,000. At today’s gold prices, that’s about a 9 million to 1 return on investment. Shares of Berkshire Hathaway can’t come close to that!)

Tapscott and Williams purport that if a company can outsource work for less money than it costs to do the same job in house, it should do so. They define Coase’s law: “A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm becomes equal to the cost of carrying out the same transaction on the open market.” GoldCorp saw the value in following this law. They also acted followed Tapscott and Williams principles of Wikinomics: “openness, sharing and acting globally.”

I think that this book contains a wealth of good information, ideas and gems that any person or company could put to use in moving into the era of mass collaboration in order to tap the power of the crowd.