Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, and Prediction Markets

With social media and how easily people can become connected, it is only logical that crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and prediction markets are starting to become more and more popular. With the Internet, one person can have access to over millions of people. That is a big reason as to why those three topics work. All three of these topics reach out to the crowd for support and wouldn’t be able to function without them.

The first article, “The Collective Intelligence Genome” is a very easy to understand break up of what exactly collective intelligence is. The article breaks up the idea of collective intelligence into four main questions. The first question is what is the goal of the activity? The second question is who is doing these activities? Why do people participate in the activity? The final question is how is the crowdsourcing being done?

The second article, “What Kind of Collaboration is Right For You?” outlines the different methods of collaboration for crowdsourcing. They mention that there are two modes of collaboration: closed and open. With closed collaboration, you are assuming that you have picked the people who will be able to create the best content. In my opinion, that is very risky because there are so many potential contributors you never reached out to solely because you didn’t have access to them.

The third article, “Prediction Markets: A New Tool for Strategic Decision Making,” explains how companies and organizations make strategic decisions based on what the crowd predicts will happen. The article even argues that prediction markets are even more accurate than forecasting software. The reason I think this is true is because when so many people are involved in making the prediction, they are all basing their prediction on the knowledge that they have. Of course, no one person can know everything and therefore when there is a crowd, you are bringing together pieces of information that each person has. So the overall prediction is a combination of pieces of information from individual people.

The article of choice that I included is about what makes crowdfunding work. Before reading this article, I assumed it would be fairly easy to reach your fund goal if it is fairly low, but the overall goal of the fund isn’t only what matters. People need to believe in your campaign and be motivated to donate. Just seeing your campaign as they browse through the website isn’t enough motivation. You need to put in a lot of effort to market your campaign and you need to have a truly unique idea.

The two cases that I chose to compare and contrast where two crowdsourcing sites called Trevolta and Kickstarter. A huge difference is what types of projects people can create. On Travolta, it is restricted to traveling, while Kickstarter has a greater variation of types of projects. Therefore I think a more specific type of person is attracted to Trevolta while Kickstarter appeals to the more general public.

Safety of Open-Source

When news broke that there was a security bug in open-source software of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols, called Heartbleed, everyone was advised to change almost all of their passwords. Some websites affected by this bug included Google, Yahoo, Netflix, YouTube, DropBox, and Facebook, just to name a few.

So what exactly was Heartbleed? It was a vulnerability in OpenSSL which is an open-source software that many websites use to securely transmit data. In order to securely transmit the data, the data is encrypted so that only the recipient can accurately see the data and hackers would not be able to decipher it. When two computers are communicating with each other, one will occasionally send a “heartbeat” which is a small packet of data that basically asks the other computer if the connection is still secure. The security vulnerability that researchers found was that the packet could be disguised and trick the computer into sending data that is has stored.

Heartbleed happened quite a few months ago, so why is this relevant? I thought it would be interesting to examine a case that is very well known, wide spread, and fairly recent to analyze what this bug means for the future and if open-source software will change. So after such a big security vulnerability, critics examined whether open-source software was actually safe. The main conclusion is that coding is not perfect so there is bound to be coding errors that may lead to a security vulnerability but that can happen with open and closed source. Critics don’t agree on which one is safer. Some argue that with open source, there are more eyeballs, therefore the chance of catching the bug is much higher. The only problem with that is in reality there aren’t really that many eyeballs constantly looking at the open-source code. Open source software lacks the financial and human support it needs to run at maximum efficiency and Heartbleed made that clear.

Ultimately, security flaws are inevitable. Even closed-source software that customers pay a lot for have security flaws. Open-source software is not unsafe but Heartbleed created a call to action to many companies using open-source software to make sure they are constantly monitoring the codes.

After what some think was the worst security bug to hit the Internet, do you think open-source is safe? What do you think people can do to prevent something like this from happening again?

Articles:

http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/

http://mashable.com/2014/04/14/heartbleed-open-source/

http://www.businessinsider.com/heartbleed-bug-explainer-2014-4

http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2014/08/after-heartbleed-open-source-more-trouble-its-worth/92309/

Social Media and…Ebola?

Every time you look at any news, you are bound to hear or read something related to the Ebola epidemic. Ebola has claimed the lives of over 4,000 people and it has yet to be securely contained. But what does social media have to do with this in relation to diffusion and social influence?

When it was confirmed that the first case of Ebola appeared in the United States, the mention of Ebola on twitter went from 100 per minute to over 6,000 per minute. The second it was made public that there was a case of Ebola in the US, that information diffused across the world in a matter of minutes. But what influence has that had? I’ll be focusing on the influence it has had to American’s since the articles are about the case in the US. Critics argue that people are starting to panic and misinformation is diffusing very quickly. As horrendous as it has been for the people affected by it, Ebola isn’t something most people need to worry about. Health care in West Africa is not comparable to the infrastructure of the US. Health care system. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health institute of the US, has given several press releases that it is quite difficult to contract Ebola unless you have had close contact with the person infected. Yet many people still believe it is airborne. But with Social Media, news gets spread so incredibly quickly but that also means misinformation spreads just as quick. An interesting comment mentioned in the Time’s article was that people are more likely to believe something they read that a friend posted on social media. Social media is all about connecting with people you know. So even though credible sources say that Ebola is not airborne, if someone close to you contradicts that on facebook, some people are more inclined to believe the people they know, than experts.

Information diffusion has allowed for the majority of the world to say updated on what is happening with the Ebola epidemic but the social influence it has is that it has caused unnecessary fear and panic. Even though the CDC has mentioned multiple times that Ebola cases in the US can be contained much quicker then in West Africa, some people still believe there is a looming threat of Ebola spreading in the US, when in reality that is highly unlikely. They want to take drastic measures like banning all flights from affected countries to the US. Information diffusion has many benefits and allow people to be quickly informed, but there are also down sides as mentioned above. It can have a drastic impact on how it influences people whether it be for good or bad.

How to you think Ebola has been perceived in the media? Are you concerned about your risk of contracting Ebola? Whether you know it’s unlikely or you truly believe it to be a threat to your health, what has caused you to feel that way?

Articles:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/10/11/the-problem-with-ebola-in-the-media/

http://time.com/3479254/ebola-social-media/

Online Social Networks and their influence

After last week’s lecture about online social networks, I thought it would be interesting to examine a real life situation of how online social networks can influence businesses and what their employees say about them. As mentioned in the lecture, certain nodes may have a greater reach of people who they can influence. So what happens when that node happens to be an enraged employee complaining about their employer? If that employee has a high degree of centrality, they could very quickly allow many people to see their complaint which may be very damaging to the employer.

In an article posted in the New York Times, something very similar happened. Two disgruntled employees were fired from the restaurant they worked at because they discovered they owed taxes that they believed was due to an error of the restaurant and went to Facebook to express their anger. The following day, they were fired because the boss believed they were being disloyal to the restaurant by complaining on such a public forum. Within days, the restaurant’s lawyers contacted them saying they needed to remove the comments and make a pubic apology for the alleged defamation. If they didn’t do so, they would sue them for defamation. The outcome was that the restaurant was not allowed to fire their employees because of what they say on Facebook or limit their activity on social media due to the Labor Relations Act.

After reading this article, it is interesting to note that employees have a lot of knowledge (not including privileged information) about the business they work for that could be very damaging if made public and employees who have a lot of power in their social network, could have a great deal of influence. It is understandable that companies wouldn’t want employees making public complaints about the company but on the other hand, customers do the same thing. So why can’t employees do it? If they feel that they are being treated unfairly or are noticing unethical business practices, wouldn’t they be able to evoke more change if they make their complaint public? What do you think? Do you think companies should be allowed to limit what employees say about the company on social media? Do you work for a company that has a social network policy? If so, how do you feel about it?

Article:

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/when-employees-knock-their-bosses-on-social-media/?_php=true&_type=blogs&module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A16%22%7D&_r=0