Crowdsourcing: Reflections on the Final Phase of Our Experiment
In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discusses four key qualities that make a crowd of people “smart”. The crowd must be diverse, decentralized, independent, and it needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. In ISTE’s first fully crowdsourced keynote, we’ve done our best to tap into the wisdom of the ed tech community crowd by using a large-scale input process to identify compelling keynote topics and speakers and select the best keynote offering for ISTE 2010.
As we’ve forged new territory through this process, we continue to come back to Surowiecki’s observations about what would make a crowdsourcing experiment a genuine reflection of the wisdom of crowds. And, with this in mind, we continue to refine the process. In the first two phases, we publically tallied the votes. This provided the venue for insightful discussions about keynote themes, the purpose and power of keynotes, and reflections on the process but was less true to the wisdom of crowd’s requirements of decentralized thinking and independent input. For the next phase, we are staying truer to Surowiecki’s guidance and building on the public discussion that has come before to solicit decentralized and independent opinions. The votes for each of the keynote candidates will be made anonymously and the tallies will not be shown during the voting process. The final vote tallies will be revealed when we announce the keynote selection in February.
Our goal has been to involve ISTE 2010 conference attendees as well as the greater ed tech community in the planning process, to listen to the wisdom of the ISTE community, and to explore new territory using technology as a tool to do things otherwise not possible. We hope you have enjoyed being part of the process. As with anything new, we understood there would be missteps and opportunities to improve the process the next time around. We would like to hear from you about how it all went. What do you think of our experiment so far? How might you improve the process? Please let us know what you think went well, and what wasn’t so great. We welcome your comments and suggestions!
Similar Posts:
- None Found
6 Comments
Learning Solution – Online Education » Blog Archive » ISTE Crowdsources Keynote Speaker
Thursday, 21st January 2010 at 7:25 pm
[...] This year ISTE decided to tap the wisdom of that crowd and opened up voting to select the speaker for the opening keynote address, a process outlined on its blog here. [...]
angie
Friday, 22nd January 2010 at 12:34 am
the process of “crowdsourcing” has been a joke. this is an insult to those in ed tech and an insult to the candidates.
ISTE Crowdsources Keynote Speaker » iThinkEducation.net!
Saturday, 23rd January 2010 at 12:42 am
[...] This year ISTE decided to tap the wisdom of that crowd and opened up voting to select the speaker for the opening keynote address, a process outlined on its blog here. [...]
Scott McLeod
Monday, 25th January 2010 at 8:30 am
Leslie, did ISTE say in Round 1 or 2 that Round 3 would consist of the leading vote-getter from each category, the top 5 vote-getters overall, or the top 5 vote-getters that fit ISTE’s budget and/or speaking criteria? You might want to clarify over on my blog b/c there’s some concern about ISTE maybe disregarding its own rules…
Just keeping you posted. See
http://bit.ly/8G9AIS
Using SMS Text in Education | Real World Teaching
Wednesday, 27th January 2010 at 3:11 pm
[...] campaign. It is a mechanism to connect and impact “the crowd” without ever assembling. If CROWDSOURCING, as the keynote speaker experiment that ISTE performed for their 2010 Conference in Denver works, [...]
Leslie Conery
Wednesday, 27th January 2010 at 8:00 pm
Scott – Thanks for the heads-up. We’ve been watching the posts but I’ve been on a heavy travel/meeting schedule and haven’t been able to respond.
With regard to whether or not we followed our own rules. Here’s what we’ve said from the start:
Phase 3: Final Speaker Selection (January 5-15)
During late December, ISTE staff will contact the top speakers to check for availability and affordability, narrowing the list to a top 5 that will be voted on during Phase 3. The grand prize of “coffee with the keynoter” will be awarded to the first person who suggested the winning speaker.
We believe that we adhered to this throughout.
Having said that, we’ve learned a lot throughout the process. There are things we would do differently now that we have the advantage of hindsight. For instance, it was always our intention to put forward the topic/speaker combination during phase three. It’s why we left the links up to the original discussion about topics. We recognize that simply putting the links to the original topics and discussions wasn’t enough and that Phase 3 did take on the flavor and focus that was not our intention. There are actually quite a few things throughout the process that have been rich learning opportunities for those of us at ISTE who put this project forward.
As I’ve said – we did our best to be true to the process we outlined in the beginning and to be respectful to the people who were willing to have their names put forward as potential speakers. I’ve appreciated the people who are planning to attend Jeff’s keynote session with a willingness to listen to what he has to say, celebrate his work, and learn from his leadership experience. Did the process play out the way we imagined? No. Could ISTE have managed the process differently and perhaps a little better? Yes. Do I think we’re going to have an excellent closing keynote with Jeff? Yes, I do.
Leave a Comment