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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.

The chapter explores the role of ICT for emergency response in areas of limited statehood. It addresses whether ICT can make the crowd not only a resource for emergency response but also an actor in that response, capable of developing alternative modes of governance. Relying on the analysis of two case studies of natural disasters in Russia, the chapter argues that ICT provides new opportunities for the organization of large-scale collective action, making it possible for volunteers to play a dominant independent role in emergency response. The role of citizen collective action in emergency situations depends on the attitude of the state actors toward horizontal citizen structures. The chapter suggests that if the state is open to the synergy of formal and informal structures, the role of citizens will be embedded within the institutional response; if the state ignores or restricts networked volunteers, alternative modes of governance emerge.

This chapter draws on the experience of Voix des Kivus—a SMS-based data collection project implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2009 and 2011. The Voix des Kivus project used a “crowdseeding” approach, which combines the innovations of crowdsourcing with standard principles of survey research and statistical analysis. This chapter discusses the key distinctions between crowdseeding and crowdsourcing, and discusses how crowdseeding might have a larger potential to empower populations by enabling the collection and distribution of information as an alternative mechanism of governance. After describing Voix des Kivus, the chapter turns to a discussion of the ethical implications that arose while implementing the project, and discusses whether or not Voix des Kivus was successful in empowering its Congolese participants.

Managers are regularly confronted with unsolved problems. If a manager knows who can solve a problem, they can assign the problem to the correct person to have it solved under an ex ante contract or other form of agreement/commitment, inside or outside the organization. If they do not know who can solve it, they can crowdsource it, broadcasting the problem to an undefined set of people (the crowd) to self-select and solve it with no ex ante contract or other commitment. Although the practice of crowdsourcing goes back to at least the Longitude Prize of 1714, research on the phenomenon has only recently flourished, thanks, in part, to advances in information technology, globalization, and other macro-environmental factors. This chapter presents a crowdsourcing primer and framework with the goal of providing management scholars with some of the fundamentals needed to pursue their research interests in this compelling phenomenon.

In tournament-based crowdsourcing, members of a crowd compete to solve a problem and the agent with the best solution wins. In collaboration-based crowdsourcing, members of a crowd cooperate to solve a problem, bringing their collective expertise to bear on the problem. Each can yield extraordinarily high-value solutions. This raises a question: Can crowdsourcing co-opetition—simultaneous cooperation and competition to solve a problem via crowdsourcing—deliver even higher-value solutions than either tournament-based or collaboration-based crowdsourcing alone? I argue that simultaneous competition to solve modules of a decomposable problem and collaboration to aggregate the module solutions produces a higher-value solution to the problem than collaboration alone. And simultaneous cooperation to reduce crowdsourcing frictions and competition to solve a non-decomposable problem yields a higher-value solution than competition alone.

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly important phenomenon that is fundamentally changing how companies create and capture value. There are still important questions with respect to how crowdsourcing works and can be applied in practice, especially in business practice. In this chapter, we focus on prediction markets as a mechanism and tool to tap into a crowd in the early stages of an innovation process. The act of opening up to external knowledge sources is also in line with the growing interest in open innovation. One example of a prediction market, a virtual stock market, is applied to open innovation through an online platform. We show that use of mechanisms of internal crowdsourcing with prediction markets can outperform use of external crowds.

This chapter looks at how both free innovators and commercial project sponsors are increasingly competing to “tighten the loop” between themselves and free innovators to obtain a larger share of voluntary and unpaid design efforts. Crowdsourcing calls by both free innovators and producers asking for assistance on innovation projects from the household sector are on the rise. Producers are also learning to support free innovators, seeking to channel their work into privately profitable directions. Hence, the chapter explains how producers are learning to support free innovators in ways that benefit themselves but not their rivals. It then explores how lower-cost pathways to commercialization are becoming available to household sector innovators. Finally, the chapter discusses how, via crowdsourcing, free innovators and producers are both learning to more effectively recruit free innovation labor from the household sector.

Because of globalisation, the requirements for bilingual LSP dictionaries have expanded dramatically, requiring more and more information for users. This chapter deals with the theoretical and practical approaches to introducing bilingual collocations and higher order phraseology in a bilingual term base/dictionary for specialised translators and domain specialists, learners and professionals. The ARTES online bilingual LSP dictionary is described in detail, showing how it is adapted to target different users by providing both a term base and an electronic dictionary. Corpus data show that linguistic information must go beyond the terminological or lexical levels and include semantic and pragmatic information, stepping thus into the domain of discourse. Finally, solutions for implementing semantic preference and semantic prosody in the dictionary are put forward.

This chapter explores the potential and challenges of basing pedagogical, bilingual electronic dictionaries on WordNet – a comprehensive machine-readable lexical database of the English language. It introduces the specifics of WordNet’s complex lexical architecture; explores the interfaces between WordNet and humanistic, pedagogical and bilingual lexicography; and highlights the Transpoetika Dictionary – an innovative, bilingualised Serbian-English pedagogical dictionary. The chapter shows that the potential of relational lexical databases by far exceeds their exclusive application in language engineering and automatic text processing. The author argues that WordNet can not only serve as a general lexicographic framework for building humanistic eDictionaries, but also pave the way for other collaborative projects in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and pedagogic lexicography. The author also discusses strategies for expanding the scope of WordNet-based humanistic dictionaries through web services and social media platforms such as Flickr and Twitter.

With the rise of the Web 2.0, collaboratively constructed language resources are rivaling expert-built lexicons. The collaborative construction process of these resources is driven by what is called the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ phenomenon, which offers very promising research opportunities in the context of electronic lexicography. The vast number and broad diversity of authors yield quickly growing and constantly updated resources. While expert-built lexicons have been extensively studied in the past, there is still a gap in researching collaboratively constructed lexicons. We therefore provide a comprehensive description of Wiktionary – a freely available, collaborative online lexicon. The chapter studies the variety of encoded lexical, semantic, and cross-lingual knowledge of three different language editions of Wiktionary and compare the coverage of terms, lexemes, word senses, domains, and registers to multiple expert-built lexicons. The chapter concludes by discussing several findings and pointing out Wiktionary’s future directions and impact on lexicography.

Created by New York lawyers Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979, the Zagat Restaurant Survey brought computer-powered statistical methods and an avowedly egalitarian ideology to restaurant criticism. The Zagats synthesized numerical ratings and narrative reviews from amateur food lovers into paragraph-length listings, eventually selling millions of slim burgundy guidebooks annually for cities around the Global North. The Survey allowed a classed cohort of power users to shape urban environments with their collective judgments, meeting a widespread desire for more extensive information on upscale consumption spaces as the rhythms of professional and social life were changing drastically for highly educated workers. The Zagat Survey was both a class strategy by an emerging professional cohort to assert their dominance over the cultural and built environment in New York City, and a prototypical location-based service (LBS), pioneering many of the features assumed to be inherent to Web 2.0 networked applications.

This chapter describes crowdsourcing projects carried out by large numbers of geographically distributed individuals acting independently but contributing to a collective whole. It discusses the differences between traditional work and crowdsourcing work and highlights the competitive advantage of crowdsourcing. It proposes a model showing how open innovation squeezes firms to pay more attention to complex tasks that are less easily addressed by innovative individuals and groups. This chapter also shows how crowdsourcing is contributing to a significant evolution of the concept of open innovation.

This chapter examines the future of the crowdsourcing based on experience in the development of the software platform MASSive Ideation. It explains that unlike other idea contests for open innovation, MASSive Ideation enables the generation and evaluation of numerous ideas and supports their further elaboration into promising concepts with the collaboration of a large and geographically scattered crowd. This chapter speculates that more companies should consider the use of creative potential of crowds to enrich their innovation processes.

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.

Early use of the Internet demonstrated that it was possible to tap the expertise of many people rapidly, simply by asking. Over time a variety of platforms have been built to aggregate the so-called “wisdom of crowds” over the Internet. A few have been tremendously successful, such as Wikipedia, but many others have failed to draw the attention of a critical mass of users. In government and politics, the challenges are sometimes greater, given concerns over control over communication, the potential for political gaming and lobbying, when crowdsourcing depends on unbiased views, and the difficulty of top-down development of a community of contributors. This chapter focuses on the lessons learned from a UK initiative to exploit crowdsourcing as a tool for policy development. Whether governments can learn from such initiatives is a key issue in developing these tools to support more democratic policy formation.

Research connecting neighborhoods and health has characterized neighborhood factors in multiple ways. This chapter discusses standard and emerging methods to measure and study neighborhood characteristics. In particular, this chapter provides an overview of neighborhood characteristic assessment methods, including self-report, systematic social observation, geographic information system (GIS) methods, Web-based geospatial methods, real-time geospatial methods, crowd-sourced geospatial methods, and information retrieval methods from online sources such as Instagram and Twitter. This chapter also discusses the strengths and limitations of each neighborhood characteristic assessment method (e.g., ease of administration, validity), and readers are provided with examples of each neighborhood assessment method applied in the epidemiology and population health literature.

This chapter assesses the current social innovation moment, looking at the potential impact of digital communications tools on organizing. Digital communications tools help build weak ties, decentralize communication and engagement, help communicate norms (both good and bad), strengthen the ability of the members of a network to coordinate their efforts, offer new modes of engagement, increase and amplify network effects, and facilitate effective crowdsourcing. In theory at least, one can see that these digital tools, and the capacities they create, likely can enhance the ability to create social capital and solve collective action problems. The chapter then analyzes the West Virginia teachers' strike of 2018, examining it in light of the capacities that new tools—like the Internet, social media, and mobile technologies—offer for building and strengthening movements. The West Virginia teachers found social media an efficient tool for organizing rallies, protests, and other activities throughout the state. Thus, one of the greatest strengths of digital tools seems to be their capacity to assist their users to coordinate action.

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.