 We are now going to segue to a presentation that's going to be delivered by Jeff Howe, our last questioner from the last session. Jeff is the, this segment is entitled Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowd. Jeff, as he mentioned, is an assistant professor at Northeastern University. He's the author of the book Crowdsourcing. Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business, a book that came out in 2008. Most of you, I think, picked up one of our programs that Alicia, who works here, was very creative in designing as an instruction manual. So this would be step three, the very important step that some of us often do not do, which is asking for help. So that's what we're going to hear about now, crowdsourcing. Jeff also runs the Twitter book club One Book 140 for the Atlantic. Jeff? Thanks a lot. Don't ask me for help. I just write about this stuff. All right, so first, this gets really anticlimactic because now I have to spend the next three minutes nattering while I plug in the system. So I want to thank Slate, the America Foundation, ASU for having me here. It was a lot of fun. So I coined the word crowdsourcing, which means I've wound up talking about it a lot for a long time. And I've always wanted to wind up in the same room with maker folk, because I write about it, and it's in my book, and I was really fascinated and enjoyed the last panel a lot, so thanks, guys. All right, so I like to start off with a movie because people like movies. And that way, if you've never heard of crowdsourcing before, which happened to be a lot in the beginning and happens to be very rarely, now it puts us all on the same page. All right, can we dim the house lights up here? So the video, is there an event person and otherwise it's going to be kind of lame. Just like that. That one has to stay on. Will you guys tell me if it's okay, it's okay. And we need sound. We need to gather physically in order to create a crowd. Suddenly, with the internet, we were able to create a virtual crowd. And what this allowed is it allowed people to get together through intent, through shared interests. This is new, this is a fundamentally new development in the course of human history, that communities are able to form simply out of shared interests, a shared passion for a hobby, a craft, and art. So crowdsourcing is when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it in the form of an open call to a large, undefined group of people generally using the internet. There's a couple crucial terms in there. One is open call and the other is undefined and they both get the same idea that the person who you think would be best qualified to perform a job isn't always the best person to do it and the cocktail party version is very simple. It's crowdsourcing is Wikipedia with everything. Photography is a great example because it's what I think of as the canary and the coal mine. What's happened over recent years of photography is the advent of three separate developments. The first is the digital camera, the cheap, affordable SLR digital camera. The second is photo editing software which has become easier and easier to use. And the third of course is the internet. And so the quality level of stock photos produced by amateurs essentially reached an equilibrium with those created by professionals. What happened was that stock photos were no longer a scarce commodity. They became an abundant commodity. Instead of charging $300 per stock photo they charged a dollar and as you can imagine the demand for a commodity that had been marked down by 99% was huge. I don't think crowdsourcing eradicates business it just changes it dramatically. It forces companies to approach us as potential partners and that's much more interesting and much more exciting. We do buy things but we also participate meaningfully in the process by which those products are created. What we see with these successful forms of crowdsourcing is that they came up organically from the people formerly known as customers from the people formerly known as the audience. The technology is so good that it's become easier for people to become very good. And then finally the emergence of online communities. I like to think about the online community as kind of a building block of crowdsourcing. It's what the corporation is to the industrial era. It showed that people could come together and self-organize into productive units what once took managers and a corporate hierarchy can now be done in the context of the community. So now we know what it is, right? I'm always kind of embarrassed by that because Wired made that right before the book came out. I worked at Wired for a long time and I was working there when I coined the word it was for a Wired article. And the thing about those movies are they make you take like ten takes. So you start out really excited but like maybe too excited. Then you get really just like bored and you know we need that passion back. And so you wind up looking really funny. You're like, the thing about ground. It's a little embarrassed by that. All right, so welcome to what totally new. I get really bored with my decks after like a year so I just totally reinvent them and cook up new stuff. So this is what I've been looking at late. I've been following crowdsourcing on and off since 2005 because it certainly pre-existed the word. Although there weren't nearly as many of the incredible examples as there are now. This is some of the stuff I'm looking at. I'll tell you what you're looking at. I'll tell you what you're not looking at. You are not looking at a retro-viral protease from the Mason Pfizer monkey virus. What you're looking at is a proposed design for the retro-viral protease from the Mason Pfizer monkey virus. The reason it's a proposed design is for a long, long, long time. Over the years, no one could figure out what the design of it was. It's an enzyme, and enzymes are composed of proteins. How these proteins fold determine their function. And sometimes that function is to make us really, really sick. In fact, in the case of this one, it's to kill us. Figuring out obviously what that function is helps us cure such diseases. So it was something of a coup in September when a group of researchers published an article in the journal Nature, Structure and Molecular Biology that after years of a, quote, wide range of attempts, and, quote, they had successfully modeled the crystal structure of the, it's commonly called the MPMV or monkey retro-virus protease. Among the co-authors was a very unusual name, the Foldit-Voyd-Crusher's group. It was not often seen in the venerable pages of a nature journal. So what was the Foldit-Voyd-Crusher's group? It was a collection of video game players, many of them without even college degrees, much less backgrounds in nanobiotechnology. And they were from all around the world. And after years of all these wide range of attempts, the attempt that worked for the collection of University of Washington molecular biologists, computer scientists, and video game designers that had created Foldit was to turn the search for the MPMV retro-virus into a video game. And that's this. So we're going to return to nanobiotechnology. But before we do that, let's give a little bit of history. I do like talking about the history of the term because it reveals something about the phenomenon itself and how it's come to be framed. I mean, that's certainly been a collaborative effort. But I think how that term first came about reveals something about the DNA of it. So I was a wired contributing editor from 2000 to 2010, roughly. And 2005 was what I was thought was my gear of the kid. I covered music for a long time in the music industry. And in the spring and summer of 2005, I was writing about Myspace. And to the extent anyone knew about Myspace and there weren't, it's hard to imagine. Now, it's meteoric rise and just as precipitous fall. But to the extent people knew about it, all they knew as it was disrupting the music industry because bands were going, they called it going band to fan. They would book their tour, find sofas to sleep on, sell merch, distribute their singles. So I was writing about the fact that Myspace was having on the music industry. And so as part of that, I basically spent the summer on the Vans Warped tour, which as anyone else been on the Vans Warped tour. I had a blast. It was awesome. I'm old, but I still skateboard. So I like doing stuff like this. And I spent a lot of time with kids in their tools. And their facility with those tools was so stunning. And this is not an epiphany for anyone in this room. But the next thought was it was that to them, you know, flash software or anything web design or their video cameras, their DSLRs, 2005 pre-DSLR, their cameras were what pencils were to us. And I mean, why are there this real culture? We're very focused on the technology. And the technology is the story. And I was like, this technology is just not the point for these kids. And the point wasn't that they were learning how to take cool videos because they wanted to be a videographer. That was just completely foreign to them. No, it's just I want to make a video. And that felt very new to me. At the time, we were very focused on user-generated content. And I thought that that was a loathsome term because, you know, we aren't users and no one sits down to generate. And when we do, we don't make content. I mean, content alone you could have me on for an hour about. But more than that, I was like, there's no way this is going to be restricted to content. Like, why are we setting up this weird artificial parameter around content? Because really what's happening is a revolution concerning the means of production. And we produce all sorts of stuff, not just content. So I didn't have a word. And the article came out and had none of this in it. But in that way, as the journalists in the room will relate to, you know, the seed for your next story is embedded in the ground for the first. You know, I knew that I was on to my next thing. I just, it was all very inchoate. And so I called my editor at one point and what I had was this metaphor and friendly wired illustrator types that are willing to make my slides for me. The metaphor was that in focusing, and remember this is 2006 on user-generated content, everyone was staring at standing around old faithful saying, look, this is the phenomenon. This is this badass thing. It shoots up exactly every 43 minutes. And this is what we should all be focused on. I just had this idea that everyone was gathered around this and no one was looking at the fact that there were actually other little guys who were shooting up. Maybe that had nothing to do with content. And in fact, Eric Von Hippel was my first little geyser because I just started frantically calling people and one of them was Eric Von Hippel mentioned in the previous panel. He's at MIT and has actually been looking at user-generated innovation since the 80s. And so it was already happening and of all things the Integrated Circuit Board. Engineers who were buying integrated circuits and then saying, I can make this better than your engineers because I use this thing, you don't, you just make it. So I want to make it on my own. And so the company started saying, yeah, sure, you can do that. So I knew I had these little geysers that had nothing to do with content. A lot of the discussion I was having with Mark Robinson, my editor at Wired, revolved around the fact that this would be a disruption is also a great promise. Clearly you look at something like this and you recognize that there's a democratizing potential and an egalitarian aspect. But also a huge disruptive influence that I would argue actually we're only now beginning to see and we'll get worse before equilibrium is reached. And so he said it's like outsourcing the crowd. And I said, oh, crowdsourcing. So that was the birth of the word anyway. And the article came out in June 2006. So we took this slide right before the article came out. There were three hits on Google. They're all written by people who worked at Wired or slept with people who worked at Wired. And then this was like two weeks later, which I don't actually believe that 700,000 people were writing about crowdsourcing. I think that Google Analytics are really weird. But anyway, right now it's like 9 million. And certainly it did kind of take off. And by far not the best article I've ever written, although it was a pretty good feat of reporting. I spent six months. I probably talked to 50 people. There weren't that many examples to make my case that there were many geysers and what we should be looking at is the tectonic shift that was actually creating a situation in which you would see these surface manifestations. So it took me six months to find the geysers. And the big breakthrough, and I mentioned it in the video, but was stock photography, where you had a case that the crowd was undercutting, was completely total disruption of the stock photo industry. It's a small industry, $2 billion. It's about the same price I looked this up because I was curious for the global market for orchids. It's also $2 billion. But you had one very large public company, Getty, that had to find a private buyer. They found a private equity buyer and were smart enough to buy eye stock photo for around $52 million. After having said that these guys were barbarians at the gates, they're the amateurs. We don't need to worry about them. They turned out to worry about them because they saved Getty's business. It's now the most profitable part of Getty's business. So all of this is animated. Maybe this is old hat to everyone. I hope it is because it would say that these simple words, which deserve to be known by everyone, are known by everyone. If not, it is from Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, that no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. Adam, how am I on time? So that's about right. So my favorite illustration of Joy's Law, just because it's so damn simple, is Innocentive. How many people in the room know about Innocentive? All right, good bit. I can still talk about. So Innocentive was a project started by Eli Lilly, by an Eli Lilly researcher named Alf Bingham in 2000. And the idea was, is even as many awesome PhD super smarties we have in our halls, we certainly, Bill Joy's Law, don't have enough. And we get stumped on projects and problems. So what would happen if we took a problem and we posted it to the world? Common idea now, the X Prize format, not so common then. So they created, well essentially it was just a bulletin board for scientists and they hired some people to go around the world and especially going around the world because a lot of the underutilized scientific intellectual capital exists in the former Soviet Union, India to some extent, China, and got scientists to sign up on this bulletin board so they would be able to see a problem. And lo, it was good. About one third of the problems were successfully solved. It doesn't sound like a lot except that when you think of that these are problems posted by Eli Lilly once they opened it up, a big consumer packaging goods firms like Colgate Palmolive, places that employ a lot of very smart people who can solve their problems. The problems that had stumped them, one third of them were being solved. Flash forward four or five years, Karim Lakhani, he's now at Harvard Business School, but at the time he was actually working with Eric at MIT, does a case study about an incentive trying to figure out how it works. He found three very, very interesting things. The first was that one third of all problems were solved. The second was that, and this is just amazing, that there's a positive correlation between success and distance from field, which is wonk speak for the idea that the less accredited you were for a problem, the better chance you had at solving the thing. So if you were, and this was anecdotally, I saw this over and over again, I would interview successful and incentive solvers. If they were chemists, they didn't bother looking at the chemistry problems. Why? Who can say why? Why would the chemists not look at the chemistry problem? It's already stumped all the chemists, right? Why are they going to look at that? They look at the crystallography problems, they look at stuff that they know nothing about, that they can apply their unique intelligence to a completely new domain. And finally, that the winners knew the answer. Again, this is, you know, think back to fold it. This 10 years of microbiologists stumped these answers that had stumped some of the best experts in their field. The winners knew whether or not they could solve it in 20 minutes. So it was knowledge that was already existing for them. In the interest of time, I won't tell you about Yuri Bodroff, although he exemplifies all the above lessons. Because I really want to go back to Atterna. Back to nanobiotechnology and leave you with that. So Atterna was started by Adrian Troy. He was one of the co-founders to fold it. And it is, for the sake of the brevity of this presentation, a lot like fold it, except with instead of looking for proteases, they're looking for synthetic RNA. The big difference is that, every week, they take the best gamers, right? So it's a video game, just like fold it. People of all ages, some as young as 11, are designing RNA. They take short tutorials. And then the difference is that at the end of every week, Adrian Troy and his team at Carnegie Mellon take the leaderboard, the top 10 designs for synthetic RNA, and they actually synthesize them in the test tube, see if they work for real or not, and then plug it back into the video game. And what I really love about this, I'll just let this play while I finish up, is that they utilize something that I saw again and again in the last six years of research, which we can call it competitive collaboration. It is being called competitive collaboration. You can come in, and if you don't like your design, you can take the winner, the one at the very top of the leaderboard, and just poach his complete design, and then you can try and improve it. And what this has meant is that it's given the collective the ability to accelerate their discovery and improve their results much faster than any individual could, and much faster, it's worth pointing out. Fold it, a rose out of Rosetta. Does anyone know what Rosetta at home was? It was millions... Remember how brilliant all this was going to be? Settie at home? Millions of computers that together were going to figure out our proteins fold. Guess what? All that magic computing power, it couldn't do it. That was one of the approaches that failed. It was three weeks of this stuff, of 11-year-olds with amazing pattern recognition. They were the ones who were able to do it. What are the applications? I don't know, but I found this, which is an RFP from DARPA, and they're going to... They want to use the same gamification principles to identify security flaws in our global middle-gov networks. You guys are from Washington. You know what that means I don't, but in our national security computer systems and who designed the RFP, fold it. So I would propose if it does not sound like hyperbole that the sky is the limit for this stuff. Looking forward to... Do we have time for Q&A? No. All right, well, I'm at crowdsourcing if anyone wants to ping me. Questions, answers, complaints. Thank you very much, guys.