Coffee Notes ramble on why Crowd Sourcing doesn't work for what I do
“A verbal note in the ongoing discussion betw Jay Rosen and myself about crowd sourcing. See the posts on today’s Scripting News for more pointers and examples. http://bit.ly/43aoOc "
Dave discusses his experience with asking his blog readers about how the foreclosure crisis was affecting them. He explains that this was not “crowdsourcing” - he did not view his readers as a “crowd”, but rather as individuals whose unique perspectives and experiences he wanted to hear. Dave contrasts this with a previous experience where a radio host’s guest talked down to the audience, assuming they would not understand a basic political concept. Dave argues that we should have high expectations of people’s intelligence and knowledge, rather than viewing them as an incompetent “crowd”. He believes this “broadcast mentality” stems from an economic conflict of interest, and that we should instead treat people as equals and individuals.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
So this is a little mini
podcast for Jay Rosen. We’ve
been talking about
crowd sourcing and he’s been
asking about it in 140
characters or less, little
bits over on Twitter and I’ve
been answering the best I can
without the
140 character limit on my blog
which is scripting. com and my
name is Dave Winer.
So and there was one aspect to the answer that I didn’t feel could be explained very well in writing.
I think I needed to explain it verbally and why crowd sourcing is not an appropriate term for what we do and I wanted to do a demo of that today. It was an inadvertent demo. I didn’t realize it was a demo until after I had posted the the piece where I asked my readers how the foreclosure crisis in the United States was affecting them. My interest was the interest that a homeowner has.
I have a house in North Berkeley and I bought it at the peak of the housing boom . It’s absolutely top of the market and since then the price has gone down about 10% in less than two years which is acceptable because I love the house. I love the neighborhood. It was it was a good move buying house. No regrets about it and I had the same experience with the last house that I bought that it went down 10% in the first two years I owned it and I ended up selling it at more than double the price I paid for it. So I’ve had the experience that you know that sort of tempers my fear here that the market doesn’t always just go down sometimes it goes up too which is sort of a glass half empty way of explaining it . So I do things like this from time to time and it’s usually on technical subjects because my readers are the kind of people who get off on on technical questions and like they what I’ve learned over the years is that first of all people are quite generous when it comes to sharing what they know and that they like to show off and they like to help and all that is at play and so if you ask a question and if people have some information about it a lot of people will will post and those discussions I mean it’s sometimes an amazing thing that is to what an incredible research tool scripting news can be. So this is a little bit off topic but the result is exactly what I had expected not a flood of messages because we don’t get that here it’s more thoughtful and takes a little time for it to build for the discussion to build and it is a Sunday morning after all and and in the end I think what we will have if it I mean it never actually is done but as it winds down which that will happen I think that it will be every bit as good as a news article written by professional journalists and you know who had been asked to sign the story of let ’s find out what people think about how the mortgage the foreclosure crisis is affecting them. So the answer is now is this crowdsourcing I would never in a million years think of it as crowd sourcing because it would be insulting and demeaning to these people who I respect I didn’t ask them because I thought of them as a crowd I asked them because I wanted their individual their individuality to come out I wanted to hear about where they live and and and real really how this is affecting them individually and personally. So no it’s not crowdsourcing it would be a very bad way of describing it and I was reminded of a of an episode of the Diane Reem show Diane Reem is a talk show host on NPR out of WAMU in Washington and I really admired Diane Reem and her spirit and the way she relates with her audience and and it’s a calling show so we do often get to hear from the people who listen to her show and and she had a guest on I don’t remember what the topic was sorry because that was actually relevant but he said I don’t imagine that many of your listeners will understand and then he started to talk about a very basic fact about how the American political system works and she stopped and she said no my listeners are very well educated very informed people and they do understand that and so let’s move on and I was struck because I don’t remember what the issue was I am a listener and I understood before I didn’t need to explain to me I ’m a very well educated person and I read a lot and I’m paying attention and he had no business talking down to me I fully understood this whatever it was it’ll come to me later of course and I’ll try to put that into my blog and I share her point of view and and even if it isn’t true of every person who ’s listening to the show and of course I’m sure it isn’t true that every person who was listening to understood the concept if you set the expectation that they that they will or they should then people will go fill in the blanks for themselves they’ll feel maybe a little bit embarrassed that they don’t know and it’s not such a bad thing that we set the expectation that people are able to create in a much higher level and then there’s something in the broadcast mentality that comes from the previous century which wants to position the the audience as being incompetent in some fashion and that the people who are on the radio or on being quoted in the newspaper article or doing the interviewing or writing the newspaper article that there’s some form of hierarchy here where the people on stage understand more than the people in the audience do but as we know from conferences J this really isn’t true very often that the that the intelligence and the insight and the experience and the knowledge are more much more distributed than that model would imply and and it’s convenient for people who want to justify their salaries and positions and so forth and the fact that they’re paid and the crowd of course is not paid and see how there’s an economic conflict of interest here in this model that that they may have a reason for wanting to perpet uate this when it isn’t in fact what is happening they may even understand it at some level but don’t want to acknowledge it but you and I since we are not part of that economic system have no such conflict and no interest in perpetuating it so I choose to take a different view of things and I see that the people who read my sight are equals in line and so I treat them as such and I’m not often not often disappointed by setting the expectation high I find that my blog has turned into a resource that is so incredibly valuable to me that that I would think of asking a question like this and I would expect to get back and thoughtful and informed response from the people who read my blog and many of whom are bloggers themselves and some of whom have blogs that have more readers than mine do some of them perish the thought actually right for newspapers I want to my I guess my final thought is that my hope is that we can level the playing field that we can understand people play different roles at different points in time and in different days of the week whether it’s a work day or a weekend day or a morning or an afternoon or an evening that people are doing different things and it does not say something about the quality of the person and that crowd sour cing in closing is a demeaning term and it shouldn’t be used we should be thinking of ourselves as individuals we should think of the golden rule if we would not want to be thought of that way we shouldn ’t think of other people that way so anyway that’s my thought for the day Dave We iner scripting news see y’all later [BLANK_AUDIO]
So and there was one aspect to the answer that I didn’t feel could be explained very well in writing.
I think I needed to explain it verbally and why crowd sourcing is not an appropriate term for what we do and I wanted to do a demo of that today. It was an inadvertent demo. I didn’t realize it was a demo until after I had posted the the piece where I asked my readers how the foreclosure crisis in the United States was affecting them. My interest was the interest that a homeowner has.
I have a house in North Berkeley and I bought it at the peak of the housing boom . It’s absolutely top of the market and since then the price has gone down about 10% in less than two years which is acceptable because I love the house. I love the neighborhood. It was it was a good move buying house. No regrets about it and I had the same experience with the last house that I bought that it went down 10% in the first two years I owned it and I ended up selling it at more than double the price I paid for it. So I’ve had the experience that you know that sort of tempers my fear here that the market doesn’t always just go down sometimes it goes up too which is sort of a glass half empty way of explaining it . So I do things like this from time to time and it’s usually on technical subjects because my readers are the kind of people who get off on on technical questions and like they what I’ve learned over the years is that first of all people are quite generous when it comes to sharing what they know and that they like to show off and they like to help and all that is at play and so if you ask a question and if people have some information about it a lot of people will will post and those discussions I mean it’s sometimes an amazing thing that is to what an incredible research tool scripting news can be. So this is a little bit off topic but the result is exactly what I had expected not a flood of messages because we don’t get that here it’s more thoughtful and takes a little time for it to build for the discussion to build and it is a Sunday morning after all and and in the end I think what we will have if it I mean it never actually is done but as it winds down which that will happen I think that it will be every bit as good as a news article written by professional journalists and you know who had been asked to sign the story of let ’s find out what people think about how the mortgage the foreclosure crisis is affecting them. So the answer is now is this crowdsourcing I would never in a million years think of it as crowd sourcing because it would be insulting and demeaning to these people who I respect I didn’t ask them because I thought of them as a crowd I asked them because I wanted their individual their individuality to come out I wanted to hear about where they live and and and real really how this is affecting them individually and personally. So no it’s not crowdsourcing it would be a very bad way of describing it and I was reminded of a of an episode of the Diane Reem show Diane Reem is a talk show host on NPR out of WAMU in Washington and I really admired Diane Reem and her spirit and the way she relates with her audience and and it’s a calling show so we do often get to hear from the people who listen to her show and and she had a guest on I don’t remember what the topic was sorry because that was actually relevant but he said I don’t imagine that many of your listeners will understand and then he started to talk about a very basic fact about how the American political system works and she stopped and she said no my listeners are very well educated very informed people and they do understand that and so let’s move on and I was struck because I don’t remember what the issue was I am a listener and I understood before I didn’t need to explain to me I ’m a very well educated person and I read a lot and I’m paying attention and he had no business talking down to me I fully understood this whatever it was it’ll come to me later of course and I’ll try to put that into my blog and I share her point of view and and even if it isn’t true of every person who ’s listening to the show and of course I’m sure it isn’t true that every person who was listening to understood the concept if you set the expectation that they that they will or they should then people will go fill in the blanks for themselves they’ll feel maybe a little bit embarrassed that they don’t know and it’s not such a bad thing that we set the expectation that people are able to create in a much higher level and then there’s something in the broadcast mentality that comes from the previous century which wants to position the the audience as being incompetent in some fashion and that the people who are on the radio or on being quoted in the newspaper article or doing the interviewing or writing the newspaper article that there’s some form of hierarchy here where the people on stage understand more than the people in the audience do but as we know from conferences J this really isn’t true very often that the that the intelligence and the insight and the experience and the knowledge are more much more distributed than that model would imply and and it’s convenient for people who want to justify their salaries and positions and so forth and the fact that they’re paid and the crowd of course is not paid and see how there’s an economic conflict of interest here in this model that that they may have a reason for wanting to perpet uate this when it isn’t in fact what is happening they may even understand it at some level but don’t want to acknowledge it but you and I since we are not part of that economic system have no such conflict and no interest in perpetuating it so I choose to take a different view of things and I see that the people who read my sight are equals in line and so I treat them as such and I’m not often not often disappointed by setting the expectation high I find that my blog has turned into a resource that is so incredibly valuable to me that that I would think of asking a question like this and I would expect to get back and thoughtful and informed response from the people who read my blog and many of whom are bloggers themselves and some of whom have blogs that have more readers than mine do some of them perish the thought actually right for newspapers I want to my I guess my final thought is that my hope is that we can level the playing field that we can understand people play different roles at different points in time and in different days of the week whether it’s a work day or a weekend day or a morning or an afternoon or an evening that people are doing different things and it does not say something about the quality of the person and that crowd sour cing in closing is a demeaning term and it shouldn’t be used we should be thinking of ourselves as individuals we should think of the golden rule if we would not want to be thought of that way we shouldn ’t think of other people that way so anyway that’s my thought for the day Dave We iner scripting news see y’all later [BLANK_AUDIO]