A Glimpse Into New Media Strategies
by Claudio VanDuijn, Journal 9, NMD200
CROWDSOURCE THE JOB:
Topcoder is a platform that uses crowdsourcing to develop people’s projects with incredible speeds. Essentially the website is a community of over 1.5 million, coders, graphic designers, and innovators. If you have an idea or project, you can simply provide the necessary details and have this community build it for you.
This company is essentially an innovation pipeline. They can help you with all aspects of your project and they do it through crowdsourcing. The company essentially directs the project to someone who knows how to break up the workload and then those individual parts are sent out to professionals. This is an excellent example of how a company can prosper based on the freelance economy, and how individuals can leverage this economy to speed up the creation process and divide the workload.
Many-To-Many?
This is an excellent example of a many-to-many solution. Topcoder is basically a broker for technological innovation. They take your companies project and systematically divide the work over thousands of trained professionals. These professionals are freelancers and paid for individual contributions to people’s projects. The many-to-many aspect comes in two ways, first the people working at your company are being helped by the freelancers, second, the freelancers are contributing to many projects at the same time. As a whole what Topcoder has created is a system of individuals who contribute to creating an innovation pipeline that can push out projects with incredible speeds. Rather than individually hiring employees to do specific jobs, the job is given to the person with the best availability, best price, and most talented in the field.
Take a look around Topcoders website HERE
Upstage the man:
Upstaging the man has always been a struggle between the powerful and the honest. If you have power in this world, through money, influence or title you are able to create great amounts of sway. A good example of this today is tax evasion through the creation of faulty nonprofits, fake corporations and so forth. I recently watched a couple of Netflix originals that addressed some of these issues. While I can’t go into too much depth because of my lack of knowledge on how these legal yet devastating systems work; instead I will make a few examples.
A new show recently released on Netflix called The Patriot Act, addresses everything from corporate greed to fraud on the high seas. The main character, a comedian does this through comedy and while the show is funny, it is still able to address real problems in the world today. These problems are addressed through comedy, and so he is able to educate the public on these loopholes large companies use to get away with everything from murder to tax evasion. Watch the trailer below.
The second movie I recently watched that goes along with the idea of ‘Upstaging the man’ is called The Laundromat. This film follows an older woman who unexpectedly loses her husband on a tour boat, it turns out the tour companies insurance is fake. This begins the older women on a journey to figure out how fake corporations are created and eventually into the heart of fraud in America and the world. The film is very well done, they use an entertaining storyline to illustrate the deeper problem of corruption and greed in the world’s top 1%. Here is the trailer.
Many-To-Many?
The idea of exposing illicit activity through media is not new, I decided to look into this topic because rather than articles or small scale productions these videos are on a world streaming site. The difference here is that these shows and movies are presented to a large number of people, and by delivering the message through entertaining means they reach parts of the population they may never have otherwise. This is a many-to-many strategy because by educating people on these topics, a conversation starts and conversation is the beginning of change.
DIY Technologies:
My first example of DIY technology is Arduino. Arduino allows anyone to begin learning to build electrical devices. The core starts with an Arduino board which allows the user to control a series of on and off switches and inputs that allow the device to receive data from sensors.
Everything regarding Arduino is open source and community-based. People share the code, electrical schematics and plans for thousands of DIY projects. Take a look at the Arduino community hub HERE.
Not only is Arduino open-source but the sensors and tools you need to create with it are inexpensive and have a tremendous range of uses. Here is an example of someone who built an automated greenhouse system that waters the plants, keeps the greenhouse in the appropriate temperature range and so forth.
Similiar grow controllers can range from $350 to thousands of dollars. By using Arduino this man was able to create a controller that was completely customized for his project and at a very small cost.
Many-to-Many?
The many-to-many attributes in this project stem from the shared platform. People desire to share their ideas, and through this community sharing everyone benefits. One person might be incredibly good at programming, while another may have sound electrical skills. By sharing we are able to combine the skills of many into solutions for many.
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