Sorry about the late posting guys, I’ve been a little busy lately:

There’s a new buzzword being spoken of on the intertubes lately, it’s ‘crowdsourcing’ the use of the public access the net provides to process vast amounts of information. It may not sound terribly exciting, but it’s certainly very intriguing. It’s probably not new either, but it’s new to me, okay? I’ll start again.

I’m here to talk about ‘crowdsourcing’, a new (to me) word to describe an old internet phenomenon, that of getting lots of people to donate a small fraction of their time instead of a small group donating all of it (and usually expecting payment).

I ran across the term recently, with the publication of the MP’s expenses database the Guardian, unable to sift through the mammoth amount of data in order to find irregularities itself, decided to open it up to it’s readers and ask them, to flag up sections worthy of investigation. The response was phenomenal, with thousands of people scanning through and sending in hundreds of inconsistencies.

I suppose I should not have been so surprised, after all, this kind of practice has been the backbone of the internet for a while. Wikipedia is founded on this very policy, replacing the dedicated staff of an encyclopaedia with millions of hobbyists editing sections of particular interest. Open source programming also works on this, amateur coders making products that can compete with those of huge software companies like Microsoft. Even the dark art of digital piracy relies on an impressive amount of collaboration between users.

It’s almost like a form of mass socialism, each gives according to his ability (and desire) but it’s given to not just those in need of it, but to those who might fancy it a little, or are just downright curious. And it’s only possible in the digital age, where the effort required in taking part is reduced to the absolute minimum (although many go above and beyond) and the distribution of the benefits is instantaneous.

But is it good for anything other than ludicrously detailed articles on comic book continuity? Well yes, it’s not only the Guardian trying to harness this idea, in fact one of the earliest examples is the SETI (search for extra-terrestrial life) program. Which, faced with enormous amount of radio data to analyse, launched the SETI@home project in 1999, you too could help discover aliens! Amazingly it worked (well, apart from the lack of Aliens) the amount of people downloading the software gave them processing power in excess of the best supercomputers on offer.

I’m almost certainly recycling things you’re already familiar with here, but it’s also things we’ve accepted without thinking about its power and possibilities. So far most crowdsourcing has gone through a central hub, but we may moving beyond that.

The current Iranian election crisis has seen an uncoordinated, disorganised but tremendously powerful movement to get information in and out of the country despite the current regime’s best efforts. Through twitter and other social media, through projects that set up crowdsourced proxies for Iranians, the internet is bending its will to the Iranian nation in every way it can. No one told it to, it just decided.

So what comes next? Anything and everything, quite possibly. What happens if the protestors succeed in Iran? If the internet wakes up one morning and realises that every one of us, in tiny, tiny ways, just helped change a nation? Where can we go from there? The sky would truly be the limit.

Many hands it seems, do indeed make light work, but only when they’re tapping at keyboards.

Tom