When a cautious writer, J.H. Bunting, decides to take his family to Paris, he realizes he's just $600 short. To raise the money his audience donates to 12 adventures they chose for him to accomplish in Paris. What follows is a series of uncomfortable, amusing, and sometimes life-threatening adventures in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Bunting finds dead authors in Pere Lachaise cemetery, performs a song and dance under Arch de Triumphe, and gets lost in the 100 miles of illegal catacombs 60 m below the city. Follow Bunting as he stumbles his way through Paris and witness a side of the City of Light you've never seen before.
Instead of outsourcing tasks to providers using labor-intensive countries, libraries around the world increasingly appeal to the crowds of Internet users, making their relationship with users more collaborative . These internet users can be volunteers or paid, work consciously, unconsciously or in the form of games. They can provide the workforce, skills, knowledge or financial resources that libraries need in order to achieve unimaginable goals.
Conceptualising the new phenomenon of constitutional crowdsourcing, this incisive book examines democratic legitimacy, participation, and decision-making in constitutions and constitutionalism. It analyses how the wider population can be given a voice in constitution-making and in constitutional interpretation and control, thus promoting the exercise of original and derived constituent power.
This book presents the latest research on the software crowdsourcing approach to develop large and complex software in a cloud-based platform. It develops the fundamental principles, management organization and processes, and a cloud-based infrastructure to support this new software development approach. The book examines a variety of issues in software crowdsourcing processes, including software quality, costs, diversity of solutions, and the competitive nature of crowdsourcing processes. Furthermore, the book outlines a research roadmap of this emerging field, including all the key technology and management issues for the foreseeable future. Crowdsourcing, as demonstrated by Wikipedia and Facebook for online web applications, has shown promising results for a variety of applications, including healthcare, business, gold mining exploration, education, and software development. Software crowdsourcing is emerging as a promising solution to designing, developing and maintaining software. Preliminary software crowdsourcing practices and platforms, including Apple's App Store and TopCoder, demonstrate the advantages of crowdsourcing in terms of software ecosystem expansion and product quality improvement.
Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations have emerged in the last decade to the forefront of Translation Studies as one of the most dynamic and unpredictable phenomena that has attracted a growing number of researchers. The popularity of this set of varied translational processes holds the potential to reframe existing translation theories, redefine a number of tenets in the discipline, advance research in the so-called “technological turn” and impact public perceptions on translation. This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of these phenomena from a descriptive and critical perspective, delving into industry approaches and fostering inter and intra disciplinary connections between areas in which the impact is the greatest, such as cognitive translatology, translation technologies, quality and translation evaluation, sociological approaches, text-linguistic approaches, audiovisual translation or translation pedagogy. This book is of special interest to translation researchers, translation students, industry experts or anyone with an interest on how crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations relate to past, present and future research and theorizations in Translation Studies.
Examples of the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing go back to at least 1714 when the UK used crowdsourcing to solve the Longitude Problem, obtaining a solution that would enable the UK to become the dominant maritime force of its time. Today, Wikipedia uses crowds to provide entries for the world's largest and free encyclopedia. Partly fueled by the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing, interest in researching the phenomenon has been remarkable. Despite this - or perhaps because of it - research into crowdsourcing has been conducted in different research silos, within the fields of management (from strategy to finance to operations to information systems), biology, communications, computer science, economics, political science, among others. In these silos, crowdsourcing takes names such as broadcast search, innovation tournaments, crowdfunding, community innovation, distributed innovation, collective intelligence, open source, crowdpower, and even open innovation. This book aims to assemble chapters from many of these silos, since the ultimate potential of crowdsourcing research is likely to be attained only by bridging them. Chapters provide a systematic overview of the research on crowdsourcing from different fields based on a more encompassing definition of the concept, its difference for innovation, and its value for both private and public sector.
This book attempts to link some of the recent advances in crowdsourcing with advances in innovation and management. It contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it provides a global definition, insights and examples of this managerial perspective resulting in a theoretical framework. Second, it explores the relationship between crowdsourcing and technological innovation, the development of social networks and new behaviors of Internet users. Third, it explores different crowdsourcing applications in various sectors such as medicine, tourism, information and communication technology (ICT), and marketing. Fourth, it observes the ways in which crowdsourcing can improve production, finance, management and overall managerial performance. Crowdsourcing, also known as “massive outsourcing” or “voluntary outsourcing,” is the act of taking a job or a specific task usually performed by an employee of a company or contractors, and outsourcing it to a large group of people or a community (crowd or mass) via the Internet, through an open call. The term was coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine. It is being developed in different sciences (i.e., medicine, engineering, ICT, management) and is used in the most successful companies of the modern era (i.e., Apple, Facebook, Inditex, Starbucks). The developments in crowdsourcing has theoretical and practical implications, which will be explored in this book. Including contributions from international academics, scholars and professionals within the field, this book provides a global, multidimensional perspective on crowdsourcing.
Social media and crowdsourcing are important tools for solving complex problems. The benefit of crowdsourcing is that it leverages the power of human intelligence cost effectively and with less time. Social Media and Crowdsourcing: Application and Analytics examines the concepts of social media and crowdsourcing as well as their analytical aspects. It explores how these technologies contribute to the real world and examines such applications as promoting social good, agriculture, healthcare, tourism, disaster management, education, crime control, and cultural heritage. The book also looks at ethical issues in crowdsourcing and future scenarios and challenges for policy. Highlights of the book include the following: A crowdsourcing application in agriculture Crowdsourcing outline for a contemporary aided medicinal backup system Crowdsourcing-based recommendation in the tourism industry Crowdsourcing mechanisms for reviving cultural heritage Expanding the overarching concept of utilizing social media and crowdsourcing to solve various real-life problems, this book discusses how to bring together the wisdom of crowds for various decision-making problems in agriculture, disaster management, and healthcare. It addresses the various ethical issues arising out of various crowdsourcing-based applications. It puts forward diverse methodologies to involve crowdsourcing in education to implement new strategies to enhance learning outcomes. This book also addresses various problem-solving techniques for recommender applications in the travel and tourism industry. Providing a systematic discussion of the many sectors using crowdsourcing as an essential part of social innovation, this book is a theoretical and methodological look at the application of social media.
Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm that promises to transform several domains: creative work, business work, cultural cooperation, etc. Crowdsourcing reflects the close-knit interplay between the latest computer technologies, the rapidly changing work model of the 21st century, and the very nature of people. The interplay makes for an exciting but at the same time challenging new field to investigate under the lens of a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from the technical to the social and from the theoretical to the applied. Early research has focused on an aspect of crowdsourcing known as micro-tasking. Micro-tasks are simple tasks (like image annotations) that anyone could perform. An emerging area is how to utilize crowdsourcing to solve problems that go beyond simple tasks towards more complex ones, that require collaboration and creativity. In juxtaposition to micro-task crowdsourcing, this book investigates macro-task crowdsourcing and its potential.
In July 2014 the Belgian newspaper Le Soir claimed that France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and the United States may lose between 43 and 50 per cent of their jobs within ten to fifteen years. Across the world, integrated automation, one key result of the so-called ‘data economy’, is leading to a drastic reduction in employment in all areas - from the legal profession to truck driving, from medicine to stevedoring. In this first volume of a new series, the leading cultural theorist Bernard Stiegler advocates a radical solution to the crisis posed by automation and consumer capitalism more generally. He calls for a decoupling of the concept of ‘labour’ (meaningful, intellectual participation) from ‘employment’ (dehumanizing, banal work), with the ultimate aim of eradicating ‘employment’ altogether. By doing so, new and alternative economic models will arise, where individuals are no longer simply mined for labour, but also actively produce what they consume. Building substantially on his existing theories and engaging with a wide range of figures - from Deleuze and Foucault to Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan - Automatic Society will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, as well as anyone concerned with the central question of the future of work.
