Imagine being able to bring contributors from all over the world to one place on the Internet, to create a new product, new brand or major event in 72 hours. Welcome to the world of 'crowdsourcing'.
Kluster is a website aiming to harness the power of online community collaboration to get stuff done. Kluster was initially built to facilitate large group decision-making during product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning. After some further thought, the developers realised that Kluster could be used for virtually any decision-making activity, with groups large or small.
Kluster members create a project with defined goals. A project could be a new product, an event, a marketing campaign, or virtually any goal that is better served by engaging a group of people. Projects are broken down into phases with small, manageable deliverables. Throughout each phase the community participates by posting 'sparks' (proposed solutions), enhancing, refining, and supporting proposed solutions to the phase’s goal. Phases can be public (allowing the entire world to influence the decision) or private (allowing a select group of your choosing to participate).
Rather than just choosing the most popular item, Kluster uses advanced algorithms to make decisions. All the activity and participation on Kluster is stored and analyzed. The data is used in the decision-making process. Each user's successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history are considered. This encourages users to earn respect, to act positively, and most importantly, enables extremely educated decisions to be made using real world logic.
To see a video of how is all works, click here.
The platform was demonstrated at TED (see previous blog post about TED here) where the event's attendees worked together to create a product prototype in 72 hours. (Rapid prototyping machines and a team of modellers are standing by.) The outcome was 'Over There', a game of global awareness inspired by a 2006 TED talk by prominent American philosopher, Dan Dennett. A community of 2,700 participants contributed over 1,200 ideas toward the successful development of the project.
Check out more information about crowdsourcing on Springwise.
Tracking the media, monitoring the message
