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This chapter contains reflections from photographer Dan Burwood about his Some Cities project. This combined classes for budding photographers, community-based commissions for new photographic work and a social media aggregator which allowed locals to upload their own images. The varied communities of the city were thus given a shared platform to present their different understandings of the city through their own visual practice. Although the project was a success, the chapter also reflects on how projects designed to bring communities together themselves ebb and flow. The author and his collaborators moved on to new schemes at the end of the project, not all of which share the community focus of Some Cities.

This chapter presents a case study of global TV site Viki (www.viki.com), which offers amateur subtitling in around 200 languages for media from around the world. It focuses on the ways in which fansubbing and fan repurposing of technology has been adopted in the corporate and media industries via crowdsourcing, underscoring the commerce/community tensions that characterise ‘participatory culture’. In its aim to overcome the geopolitical constraints that limit the availability of media in many parts of the globe, Viki deploys a legal, business framework that overrides the national and linguistic biases of professional subtitling and dubbing via the ‘chaos’ of fan agency and interventionist practice. It also pinpoints the critical role played by language and multilingual publics within the evolving dynamics of convergence. Finally, this case study explores claims that fansubbing and other forms of community translation may be contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of linguistically diverse publics by enabling industry players to continue to underserve minor language communities.

Partly fueled by the pervasiveness of information technologies that facilitate the broadcasting of problems to crowds, and by anecdotal examples of phenomenally high-value solutions from outsourcing some problems to crowds, growth in the research and practice of crowdsourcing for problem solving has been remarkable. Research streams have been emerging in different disciplines. In this introduction to the volume, we introduce twelve chapters by scholars—from different disciplines—who explore interesting topics from some of these emerging research streams. The chapters fall into different groups distinguished by whether value is created and captured via tournament-based, collaboration-based, or hybrid crowdsourcing activities. We also offer future research directions and conclusions.

Crowdsourcing contests are used widely by organizations as a means of accomplishing tasks. These organizations would like to maximize the utility obtained through worker submissions to the contest. If this utility is greater than that obtained through alternative means of completing the task (e.g. hiring someone), the task should be crowdsourced. We analyze the utility generated for different types of tasks and provide a rule-of-thumb crowdsourcing contest design. Knowledge about the relative strengths of the workers participating in the contest is an important factor in contest design. When the contest organizer is unsure about the strength of the workers, crowdsourcing contests deliver higher utility than would hiring or assignment. Disseminating worker strength information acts as a lever to influence participation and increase utility in the contest. Finally, while crowdsourcing is a good option for generic tasks, it might perform poorly for highly specialized tasks.

Computational design is aimed at supporting automating design processes using computational techniques. However, some classes of design tasks involve criteria that are difficult to handle only with computers. For example, visual design tasks seeking to fulfil aesthetic goals are difficult to handle purely with computers. One promising approach is to leverage human computation; that is, to incorporate human input into the computation process. Crowdsourcing platforms provide a convenient way to integrate such human computation into a working system. In this chapter, we discuss such computational design with crowds in the domain of parameter tweaking tasks in visual design. Parameter tweaking is often performed to maximize the aesthetic quality of designed objects. Computational design powered by crowds can solve this maximization problem by leveraging human computation. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of computational design with crowds with two illustrative examples: (1) estimating the objective function to facilitate the design exploration by a designer and (2) directly searching for the optimal parameter setting that maximizes the objective function.

Recently, a number of co-creation approaches and techniques have been proposed for supporting innovation processes. These range from traditionally organized ideation workshops within an organization, to implementation of open innovation methods that allow the involvement of various external and globally distributed partners. Particularly in dynamic and emerging industries, innovation seems necessary, with both closed and open approaches being applied. This chapter provides an empirical study on idea contests with customers and employees of a large telecommunications provider in Austria, and provides insight into the commercial feasibility of ideas, their origin, and likelihood, as well as how social media tools support community building during idea generation. Aiming at developing basic managerial implications on how to apply crowdsourcing effectively, we compare the outcomes of open, semi-open, and closed co-creation approaches, and discuss the importance of lead users and idea-sponsors. We find evidence for offline community building and other aspects supporting organizational crowdsourcing.