Up until recently, crowdsourced placemaking only made it to the front page of this website. Sunday, July 27, 2008, was a seminal moment as it hit the front page of the fifth largest newspaper in the U.S., the Washington Post in the article Online, a Community Gathers to Concoct A Neighborhood Eatery. The story, written by food writer Jane Black, is focused on the crowdsourcing of a green, healthy, education and community-oriented restaurant in Washington DC called Elements, which has been profiled here a few times.

I actually think this is one of the best crowdsourcing articles for a number of reasons:
- It quotes Jeff Howe, the person who popularized the term crowdsourcing and has a book coming out very soon.
- It quotes a New York-based restaurant consultant. You can’t get much more qualified than that.
- It quotes two of the crowdsourcers; the future restaurant customers. When was the last time you got to read about what they think?
- It quotes, ahem, yours truly, and the owner, Linda Welch, which leads to my favorite part of the article:

“When Welch told him about her plans, Takemoto suggested crowdsourcing the restaurant. “I said, ‘Great!’ “ Welch remembers. “ ‘What the hell is that?’ ”

Why are large organizations so focused on maintaining their bureaucracy rather than providing what’s needed when it’s needed? That’s what Clay Shirky answers in his new book on crowdsourcing, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and his Smart City Radio interview focuses especially on cities. Some valuable lessons:

- It’s easy to create a new bureaucracy, and very hard to dismantle it.

- The first stage of crowdsourcing is sharing ideas. The second is doing something about it; collective action - “altering your behavior to synchronize your efforts with people who are altering their behavior to synchonize their efforts with you.”

- Within crowdsourcing, because the costs within the crowd of experimentation and failure are largely negligible, innovation and improvement happen much faster. “The cost of failure is so low, these systems actually progress much faster than their hierarchical managed counterparts, precisely because everyone learns much quicker what works and what doesn’t. If institutions did a better job of learning from their failures and also understanding that sometimes it costs less to try something than to sit around deciding whether it’s a good idea or not, it would have a hugely positive effect.”

In my experience this is probably the single most debilitating impediment in initiating a crowdsourcing project - convincing the project leader that they can’t spend so much time planning out what the crowd will or should do - just let them go and watch carefully.

When asked how he would initiate a large-scale crowdsourcing program, “Build a system that does two things at the same time - takes absolute any input from anybody anywhere and very quickly sorts the good stuff from the bad stuff. You can’t try and fliter that stuff in advance - you have to be able to sort after the fact.” He proposes a protocol where if you submit one idea, you have to rate three existing ones.

Many of us are now familiar with crowdsourcing, but the most often asked question is how it’s applied in the real world. Writer and web community creator Josh Catone explains the three categories of crowdsourcing, though I took the liberty of clarifying it further, followed by how it applies in the world of cool towns:

Creation: Developing a new product or business. Examples include Wikipedia and tools for creating new projects like Cambrian House and CrowdSpirit. This is the basis for CoolTown projects like crowdsourcing attainably-priced green condos or rooftop restaurant (pictured).

Prediction: Collective decision making. Examples include businesses that let crowds vote on isolated decisions, like Jones Soda’s labels and Kettle potato chip flavors, or finding gold. This would be the approach for determining which neighborhood to crowdsource a coworking site in, for instance.

Organization: Prioritizing what’s important, what’s not within a body of knowledge. Examples include digg, del.icio.us, Google. Google determines its results based on what people link to the most, while both digg and YouTube are self-organizing services based on what its users think is most popular. Organizing all that’s going on in the crowdsourced placemaking universe is one thing CoolTown Studios will be launching soon, following the precedent set by its Washington DC-based CreativesDC site. This is the easiest way to start crowdsourcing your life.

Image source: Restaurant in Melbourne, by Mark (LP).

Is there a third place you’d like to see in your neighborhood? Wish there were affordable green loft residences in your city? Think it’d be cool to have a pedestrian-only district brimming with outdoor dining? In the industrial economy there was little we could do about it. However, in our current knowledge economy, that feeling of helplessness is gone - the power to realize our collective intelligence manifested via inspired built places is now.

Here are a few resources to get informed, in increasing order of commitment:
- Crowdsourcing Cool Places for Creatives (13 pages)
- Remixing Cities: Strategy for the City 2.0
- We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business (176 pages)
- Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (338 pages)
- Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business (August 2008)

Bookmark this entry URL for when people ask you what resources they can read to better understand how they can crowdsource the collaborative vision of creatives into real places, events and scenes.

This entry also marks the introduction of the CoolTown wiki and forums, though I’m still getting the bugs out. Please do post your thoughts via the discussion thread link below.

Image source: Shanhai, by YY

A neighborhood microbrewery is a good indication that you're living in a progressive area, but a crowdfunded one? Let's just say if that were the case, there'd probably be a lot of reason to get together, hoist a beer and celebrate every milestone one could think of. BeerBankroll is planning to be the business model behind that brewery (but thank goodness not the name of the brewery). In the land of the neighborhood pub, it's not surprising this is a UK joint.

Goal: Establish a local brewery and pub.
Membership cost: $50
Total membership required for established business: 50,000
Total investment required to start: $100,000 (200 members, for those who don't want to do the math)
Membership influence: Voting on the company name, logo, product design, product mix, marketing plan, advertising, sponsorship...
Profit sharing: One third to members in as redeemable reward points; one third to the company; one third to charity.
Timetable: None - crowd determined.

Check out their FAQ here.

Image source: London pub by prosto photos.

Finally, a more compelling answer to the question...

What is crowdsourcing?

When I get asked that (a lot), I first confirm that the person asking knows what outsourcing is - which is when work is transferred to a foreign company, where a company's employees are replaced by a foreign employees. With crowdsourcing, the work is transferred to its future customers instead, where a company's employees are replaced by the organization's existing and future customers. Compensation comes with recognition or reward.

Thanks to innovation consultant Charles Leadbeater and his upcoming book We-think (not to be confused with We Are Smarter Than Me), I can now just point people to the video above.

Of course, if people want a more detailed overview of crowdsourced placemaking, they can check out this document, or Charles' printed accompaniment, Remixing Cities: Strategy for the City 2.0.

Adams Morgan, the preeminent natural cultural district of Washington DC, has no problem attracting nightlife whatsoever, especially on the weekends when you'll have difficulty walking down the sidewalks that are packed with pedestrians.

However, weekdays during the day are another story, when only a tiny fraction of the restaurants are even open and pedestrians are sparse. The picture above isn't a normal day (taken during the annual Adams Morgan Day festival), though that's what it could be if the region's share of the 30 million people working at home decided to crowdsource a hundred closed-during-the-day businesses into a contemporary information economy workplace district.

That's what the newly established Adams Morgan Works crowdsourcing program is for, to follow the lead set by the highly successful Tryst coffeehouse, The (24-hour) Diner and coworking Affinity Lab and establish the customer base for the openings of several more daytime workplace venues. Initiated by CoolTown Beta Communities, Think Local First and Salon Contra, if you live in the area, become one of the founding members by joining its crowdsourcing groupsite here. You can get the vibe for the nascent entrepreneurial business community in this video.

The first project at hand is helping a modern Euro-style restaurant transition to being open during the work day - can it be done? Will they provide a more affordable daytime menu? You'll determine its success as you score points for your contributions and earn rewards. The first meeting? A happy hour with sponsored entertainment and food of course, but you have to be registered on the groupsite to get an invite!

This is another one of those 'it was just a matter of time' things...

We've gone over how to crowdsource places and scenes, but not events. Well, here's a real world example in Scotland...

The Tennent's Mutual is a music festival with a quarter of a million $ budget (this can obviously be scaled smaller or larger depending on your market)... that its founders will allow music lovers to "shape, create and dictate gig provision - from selecting artists and debating locations to calling the shots on ticket prices."
Sponsored by Tennent's Lager, the 'crowdmanaging' opportunity is free, and its advisors include the likes of the Rolling Stones' Andrew Loog Oldham, so there goes the myth that this is only for college students.

Another one of the advisors, Stewart Henderson from Chemikal Underground, comments on the rengen-like impact, "This is a total watershed time that we're living in at the moment. It will change things completely--irreversibly. What Tennent's has done is they've effectively set themselves up as patrons. It's a positive thing as it allows things to happen that may not have otherwise."

Profits from this event will fund the next one. One can just see a viral loop network forming soon...

At first glance this may seem like a lot of made-up words, but they're actually specific terms for solutions to what are known as cloud problems - diffuse and impossible to pin down, requiring "cultural and behavioral change that yields intangible benefits of greater trust, respect, tolerance and social capital. There are no easy answers to complex problems.

Each of these terms were defined separately: crowdsourcing (as it applies to placemaking), viral loops networks, natural cultural districts, and will be used extensively from here on out.

However, here's a concrete outline to provide the gist of what this equation is. Crowdsourcing is about creating content that people really want. Viral loop networks are the means to replicating it. Natural cultural districts are the result, a complementary collection of organically-created third places, scenes and events reflecting what people authentically want.

Image source: Cafe on La Rambla, Barcelona, Spain by avinashbhat.

What makes 'organically-grown' retail and entertainment districts (natural cultural districts) so cool? A lot of it has to do with the presence of local, independent businesses, you know, the shabby chic coffeehouses, restaurants with live music and neighborhood events, unique shops with cafes...

Many of you are also now familiar with crowdsourced placemaking, especially one specific business, one building, and one district at a time. But what if you wanted to make a difference to invigorate all of the local indie businesses in the natural cultural district within your own neighborhood, and you wanted to do it now?

Let's crowdsource a tool and system to do just that, shall we?

Let's start with a sponsor and an existing prototype a few triple-bottom-line businesses co-developed, such as a 'TV guide' and directory web portal and crowdsourcing tool for all the events, experiences, scenes and third places in your retail district that exist... and don't exist.

The effort to date is resulting in a vision to make it vastly affordable for all main streets, mass customizable, highly googleable, with Amazon-like user reviews/ratings of all the businesses and events, the ability to suggest missing events on the 'TV Guide', and the opportunity to crowdsource the missing venues that the local creative patrons collectively feel are sorely needed... In Adams Morgan, Washington DC, a willing candidate for this program, it's a bakery; another great coffeehouse because the present one's too crowded; a larger performance theatre; more legitimate places to buy clothes...

The incentive to join this crowdsourcing effort, in line with the Think Local First campaign (which I guess fittingly doesn't have a national website) and perhaps the National Main Street Center, is not only the chance to customize a program to help revitalize your neighborhood commercial center, but every contributor gets a tenth off the eventual cost, the top ones win a third to half of the eventual cost, some even free.

Email to participate via the email link in the right column.