Gamification of the crowd

I recent article I read highlights some of the power of crowds and mixes in some gaming concepts to make a novel use of crowdsourcing to help scientific progress. The amazing claim is that the power of the crowd actually came up with an enzyme that was better than anything the scientists working in the field had come up with on their own. The new crowd produced enzyme is 18 times more effective than it was before the crowd got involved.

The crowd playing this game are logged into a system called FoldIt, that basically requires folding proteins to form a correct solution. It is like a biological version of Rubik's cube. It has rules and systems, that can be learnt and lend themselves to crowdsourcing. The power of the crowd is the ability to tackle these complex objects in bite sized pieces and problems. One of the fascinating things is that the crowd are not all experts in protein folding and in fact do not need to be to play. The rules of gene folding are like the rules of a game that can be learnt and played with.

The lesson to be learnt here is that by creating a compelling game that has easy rules and ability to experiment without consequence has not only grown a large interested group of game players, but has actually enabled time and effort playing the game to be turned into something practical in the real world. This fails nicely inline with the whole concept of innovation and working on bite sized problems, using a growth mindset and playing in safe environments. Nice confirmation of some of those concepts.

You can read some more about some of my crowdsourcing discoveries here and here.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a fascinating term coined Jeff Howe, journalist at Wired magazine, to describe the use of large groups of people working on a common task in bite sized chunks. His latest book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, is a great overview and summary of the current trend and ideas on group problem solving and content generation. 


Not everyone agrees with the concepts he raises that the group is more potent than the individual creator, but he does raise some interesting talking points around the open source programming model and content sites like iStockPhoto and YouTube. For me the most fascinating aspect of crowdsourcing and what it allows is that someone whom is a professional in one field of work, can lend his skills to another, which has long been recognized as a good way to innovate. Also the concept of people having other interests outside of their chosen career, that can be used and improved by adopting a crowd of interest, seems to fall nicely inline with modern thinking around people being passionate about things that are not necessarily done for money or profitable gain, but more for personal fulfillment and challenge. 


Overall I think crowdsourcing has some very interesting concepts and the examples given in the book are very compelling, whether or not it can be replicated easily across different domains remains to be seen, but at the least I like the ideas of working as a group of passionate like minded individuals to solve bigger problems in smaller pieces. This book is a great introduction to the concepts and is an easy read to get upto speed on the current trend.