This post originates from a path and a series of events that has become a life practise over the past number of years. I read the Age and the NT News online and generally from the IT section of the Age find an interesting article and follow links within the article or google a word I don't know. If the interest continues and it is related to eLearning (or flying or family) I might see if the knowledge or idea presented can be applied or reinterpreted into a context for my world. I say "my" because it is a little serendipitous, random and self indulgent.

Which brings me to crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is:

Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.

For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation), or help capture, systematise or analyse large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Turns out I advocated for this after there was a tragic accident near Alice Springs. A young man fell down a disused shaft while riding his motorbike. It appeared in some areas that folks were more worried about who was responsible for the hole rather than trying to stop future occurrences of a similar nature. I thought that by getting the public to identify on Google Earth (one of the top crowdsourcing tools and companies) where these holes were, we could get the public to email their kmz files of locations to a central aggregator, who could place these kmz layer files like overhead transparencies on the top of a map and then the task of validating the data accuracy would be reduced as the public would have identified the "needles in the haystack" or rather holes in the ground.

So after reading about an iPhone application that allows you to point a phone at a house and if data is available will tell you about any planning property development activities that might affect the property. It works by getting people who live in a council jurisdiction to log onto their council website and by simply trawling through a view property development web pages and letting the software application's developer track what you do, the content from that council's site is "screen scrapped" into their database. So the public in a jurisdiction of their choosing can contribute to a larger centralised database, bringing together council data in a way that state or federal agencies would not be able to achieve.

So, where am I going with this?

In the NT we have close to 200 schools - not a lot by comparison with other states, but a substantial set of demographic locations.

Let's say a geography class on a given day or week captured a photograph of a geographic feature and tagged it with metadata - Tennant Creek, Devils Marbles, Karlu Karlu etc and place that into a collaborative picasa web album and attribute creative commons rights to it, we would have 200 images of diverse locations in one day, in a location where we could share.

Biology students could photograph flora and fauna from their area and contribute it to a centralised location. Picasa, Google Earth and many other web 2.0 applications permit us to create and share in a controlled environment - ie we choose who we let see and share our photographs. We also choose who can be a contributor.

If we stick to places, flora, fauna we avoid issues of securing talent releases. This doesn't mean pictures with folks in them should not be uploaded, but rather those photographs need to reside in an area dedicated to pictures with people.

So, we have Stress Down Day, Human Rights Day, Speak like a Pirate Day and many others, so why not an NT image day - one in the wet and one in the dry. We pay a lot to get images we can use on our web sites and in our online training material - by crowdsourcing image acquisition, we build a collection far richer than one photographer could capture.

Would love comments on other project possibilities, tools that would make this easier etc

 

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