A Few Reflections from SXSW Crowdsourcing Panel

Crowdsourcing

View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

I was honored to design and facilitate a panel at SXSW on Sunday called "Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change."  The panelists were Holly Ross, Amy Sample Ward, David Neff, and Kari Dunn Saratovsky. We were also very lucky that Claire Sale volunteered to be our Twitter advocate who monitored the Twitter stream and verbalized important points and insights.  

We addressed two content areas:

• The art and science of crowd sourcing for social change
• Next practices in integrating social media for program delivery that leads to social outcomes

We used a broad definition of crowd sourcing, simply stated as:

Getting ideas, content, volunteer tasks, money, or other things from a wide swath of people. And that’s good thing for solving complex social problems with innovative ideas.  During the session, it was pointed out that crowd sourcing is a way to people, organizations, and communities work together for mutual good, and without competing.

The second topic started percolating at last year's SXSW Social Media for Social Good BBQ and a question - so where are the good examples and techniques?  And, of course, crowd sourcing is a technique being used across the social sector for different goals.  So, we decided to "eat our own dog food" that is model the use of crowd sourcing to design and implement the panel.   Amy Sample Ward and Holly Ross came up with the "Social Media for Social Good Case Study Contest" and did all the heavy lifting to make it happen.

For the Case Study Contest, we used a submission form and then asked our networks and communities to participate by submitting examples of how they have integrated social media into program delivery.   We also asked the community to vote and rate the examples.  Then, we asked the panelists to pick a few to share during the panel.  These were (as captured by blogger Marcia Stephanek):

• Open Green Map, offered up by Holly Ross, helps communities map their eco-friendly spots, whether it's a bike rack or a solar-heated apartment complex or a public herb garden. Using this open source collaborative platform, the Manhattan-based nonprofit has so far engaged more than 600 communities in 55 countries in creating citizen maps to catalyze new environmental projects, large and small. The maps are made by community members. OGM helps.
  
  
• Seattle Free School, suggested by Amy Sample Ward, uses social media to organize classes and teach students. “The owners found each other via social media and the project was born from the interaction,” Ward said. “This is ‘for the community by the community’ education and engages the best local experts to share their knowledge and experience for free."
  
  
• Invisible People, an nonprofit that uses video storytelling to help de-stigmatize homeless people. "Our hope is that you'll get mad enough to do something," its Website reads. Invisible People uses crowd sourcing to select the best stories and interviews.

My goal for the session was to create a fusion between the traditional talking head panel, followed by Q&A and a core conversation.  I was also wanted to interject crowd sourcing from the audience in the room or via the hashtag on the Twitter (crowdx) in real time.   So, armed with an improvised mobile wireless mic, I used an Oprah style facilitation.  So after introducing the panelists and topic, I quickly left the platform/stage and roamed the audience to ask them questions or share stories related to the topic. 

So, for example, after our panelists briefly shared the above examples, I asked the audience for other examples.   A funny thing happened.   I knew a number of folks in the room and I was staring them down, hoping they would speak up first.  I think with Oprah style "person on the street" type interview - you want to begin with someone you already know, perhaps seed a few opening stories.  

I noticed  the brilliant Andy Carvin in the front row and looked him straight in the eye and he waved me off.  Then I asked Claire Sale if anyone had offered an example on Twitter.  Claire, who didn't know Andy, said "Someone named Andy Carvin mentioned that I asked each of the panelists to create an ignite style presentation cited Project NOAH. I told the audience that I was hoping he would speak and Andy shared a few more examples, captured here by Marcia Stepanek.

I was modeling crowd sourcing and my new definition of an expert:  Your expertise is in your network.  I wanted to make sure that the backchannel was less of a place for snark, but more a place to capture ideas, insights, and resources.   I kept encouraging people to add their urls or best resources into the stream, add insights, or make corrections.  

Ben Rigby, who was also in the room, was testing an awesome new twitter tool he created called "Tweet Notes" which helps you summarize the tweets, add the most tweeted links, and most frequent participants.  We had a total of 1500 tweets during our panel and this tool made it easy to sort through.   Peggy from Wiser Earth went through the resulting transcript and pulled out some of the key tweet points and users.  We were also lucky to have Sarah Davies live blogging notes as well.

In order to pull this off (and I think it worked out), it required some preparation before the session.  We had several phone calls and collaborated using a google document to capture notes and tasks.   The first layer of preparation was the content.  I created a script of conversation starters/questions about crowd sourcing and using social media for program delivery.  I asked each panelist to create an ignite style presentation to answer the questions briefly.  Amy Sample Ward shared her thoughts in a blog post along with her presentation.

Then I reviewed each slide deck and created a compilation (see above) and developed the final script.  The only rule I followed was that not every panelist had to answer every question.  I identified a person to kick off the answer.  I wanted to leave space to improvise question probes and pull in people from the audience or encourage people to put ideas into Twitter.  We had too much content, so next time I'd only prepare half as many questions. 

I also prepared a list of urls for the Twitter Advocate, Claire Sale, to share in the stream to model sharing of resources.   I also promoted the session to people in my network who were not attending SXSW to participate via the hashtag, an example of real time web.

What would I do differently for next time?

• Get a hand wireless mic
• Get to the room early and rearrange the furniture to accommodate better moving around during the discussion.  The seats were set up theatre style and 15 minutes before the panel, the room was packed.
• Have fewer discussion questions - focus on one topic, not two
• Have a brief over that lays out the definition and concept models
• Have a few "plants" people willing to share a story or resource or disagree with a panelist come early in the session
• Test Guy Kawasaki's 30% rule for Q&A and eye contact tip.

What I do the same?

• Have brilliant panelists like Amy, Holly, Kari, and David - they truly made it work!
• Have a brilliant audience
• Prepare enough to be able to improvise and riff but not  too much

My biggest regret is that I didn't get a chance to give shout outs to every single person in the room who had something to offer and particularly to those folks who I know and love and couldn't get to them because of the layout of the room.

Holly Ross created a page over at the WeAreMedia wiki summarizing the posts and links.   If you were in the room or not or have additional thoughts on crowd sourcing, please add them to the WeAreMedia Wiki. 

If you were in the session or participating through Twitter, I'd love to know how it could have been improved for next time?

Update: 

Paul Massey:  How Crowdsourcing Adds Value

What Gives:  Challenges, Tips, and Lessons from Crowdsourcing

Comments

[Quercus Florida]

Great. I'm keeping this for future reference and spreading it around a little.

[Tori Tuncan]

Love the "Twitter Advocate" concept. Was that specific to this panel, or was it a SXSWi-wide thing?

[Account Deleted]

Definitely a good resource for someone who couldn't be at SXSWi. I wish there was a recording to watch for a more clear understanding of everything that was said - maybe a live stream next year? Or maybe I'll just get on a plane and see it firsthand. Either way, great content!

[Beth Kanter]

Tori: We set that up. but the idea came from Cliff Atkinson. I recently did a workshop on how to incorporate social media into trainings
http://socialmedia-for-trainers.wikispaces.com
you can learn more there.

I think one thing for the future is to have more twitter advocates and have them assigned to monitor different sessions or time - there was a huge volume of tweets.

[ben rigby]

Thanks for the recap beth. was great to be in the audience hearing (and feeling) all of the excitement around crowdsourcing and social impact.

One of the salient points I took away from the session was that although everyone (at least in our techhy circles) is familiar with the term 'crowdsourcing' - there's not yet a useful framework for talking about the different types of crowdsourcing (ie: labor on demand a la mechanical turk vs. asking your community to help out on a project vs. any activity involving a crowd of people). It occurs to me that creating such a topography would be useful.

As for feedback on the panel - i *loved* the Donahue walkaround style. That made it much more engaging. Rearranging furniture could definitely help - as could doing something like Gunner does before his Aspiration Tech sessions where he has people create a human spectrograph of opinion along a line taped in the middle of the room. This technique *really* gets people moving, thinking, and connected with the topic and eachother.

[Ben Rigby]

Opps, i left out a word above. Meant to say "everyone is familiar with the term 'crowdsourcing' - BUT there's not yet a useful framework..."

[Jake Brewer]

It was a great panel, Beth. Great synopsis.

I, personally, learned and thought about a lot in terms of how to build a truly network-centric organization that crowdsources ideas, talent, energy and resources.

Thank you for what you, Amy, Holly, Kari, and David bring to this community.

[Lguite]

Beth, the panel was one of my favorite panels at the whole SXSWi and that was mostly because your panelists were super stars! I definitely learned a thing or two that I will bring back and share with my EDF coworkers.

One thing that would help for next time would be using that big screen at the front of the room to show the Twitter stream or something like Google Wave to capture everybody's thoughts, examples, questions, etc. The conversation moved so fast that I'm sure I missed a gazillion awesome points while creating tweets of my own!

Thanks for the recap and awesome sxswi session!

[Glorysgirl]

I'll second what Ben said about it being great to be in the audience and hearing and feeling the excitement. I definitely agree with you Beth that next time around I would've liked to have a little bit more of an intro/overlay before getting into examples. I know we did crowdsourcing definitions first but I think it might of been nice to stay broad a bit longer, discussing standard or type examples and then diving into specific case examples.

Great panel and great SXSWi experience overall!