Berkman Luncheon Series >

mar
17
2009

The role of non-monetary incentives in crowdsourcing and social production projects

Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine

Tuesday, March 17, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET.

Cory Doctorow popularized the notion of “whuffie”—a reputation-based currency that took the place of money—in his science fiction book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Web 2.0 conventional wisdom—promulgated by this speaker, among others—is that whuffie and other non-monetary incentives fuel a vast portion of the collaborative, productive activity taking place on the Internet. But what little empirical data exists shows that money plays a greater role than this somewhat Utopian vision allows. Is Whuffie the next coin of the realm, just wishful thinking or a combination of both.

About Jeff

Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he covers the media and entertainment industry, among other subjects. In June of 2006 he published "The Rise of Crowdsourcing" in Wired. He has continued to cover the phenomenon in his blog, crowdsourcing.com, and released the book Crowdsourcing in 2008. Before coming to Wired he was a senior editor at Inside.com and a writer at the Village Voice. In his fifteen years as a journalist he has traveled around the world working on stories ranging from the impending water crisis in Central Asia to the implications of gene patenting. He has written for U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Alysia Abbott, their daughter Annabel Rose and son Phineas and a miniature black lab named Clementine.

Links

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Location
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
License
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
Copyright Holder
The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Radio Berkman: Crowdsourcing - Fact or Myth?

Crowdsourcing has been touted as a future business model for everything from design, to advertising, to reporting, to data analysis. But is it for real, or just trendy? Jeff Howe, of Wired Magazine, put a stamp on the phenomenon with his 2006 book Crowdsourcing, and has been gathering evidence for its development as the future of a participatory economy. He sat down with David Weinberger to go into detail. General Fuzz: “Cream” and “Walking Home”

Produced 23 Mar 2009

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Location
Berkman Center
License
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported
Copyright Holder
The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Last updated March 17, 2009

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