Tag: crowdsource

April 3, 2016

abc for sustainable crowdsourced public engagement

http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/index.html

It was my pleasure to present again this week the ‘abc for sustainability’ framework we developed at Oxford back in the day.

The University of Edinburgh Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Network hold regular event throughout the year, and this week it was my turn. I was delighted also, to have with me again, my colleague Kate Lindsay.

A recording of the event will be available soon, which is lucky, because there weren’t very many people in the room. Kate presented the story of the Great War Archive, an OER digitisation and community crowdsourcing initiative begun in 2008 which continues to grow and thrive. I merely set the scene for her by covering the basic underpinnings of the Oxford Community Collection model.

Lorna tweeted and storified.

The RunCoCo project (2010-2011) supported the projects funded by JISC as part of their Developing Community Content call. “The suite of projects funded under the JISC’s Community Content call are aimed firstly at creating and enhance digital content collections by developing the engagement between content owners in the universities and specific, or general, groups of the external public. Secondly, they are intended to develop more strategic co-ordination within the universities, focusing on the relationship between digital collection curators and business and community engagement teams.”

RunCoCo was set up to offer advice, training and open source software to those interested in running a community collection online. The outcomes and lessons learned can be synthesised into a simple ABC of advice for projects and groups who aim to ‘crowdsource’ with sustainable success:

Aim for two-way engagement;
Be part of your community;
Challenge your assumptions.

The outputs of the project are available on the RunCoCo website for free. These include guides, workflows, reports, training materials and open source software.

The content of my presentation was based on the JISC report ‘Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources: The JISC eContent Programme 2009-11’. Our chapter is: Edwards and Highton (2011) ‘RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online‘.

It is a wee bit disconcerting to find that since the JISC pages are all disrupted, you have to look in the web archive to find it. http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140615013612/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/general/2011/JISCeContentClusteringAndSustainingDigitalResources.pdf

It’s a good read. Jisc at its best.

February 21, 2015

we can [edit], yes we can

We can edit and we can eat cake. Picture taken by me, no rights reserved, and no leftovers.

The ‘Women, Science and Scottish History editathon‘ series of events in Innovative Learning Week at University of Edinburgh was a great success. We ran sessions on 4 days, had plenty of new students, staff and friends join us, edited more than 30 articles and trained dozens of novice wikipedia editors.

Each day, the one-hour introduction to editing Wikipedia focused on offering tips and insight into different approaches as well as practical training. Participants were welcome to attend as many days as they would like: everyday we added something new. Our Wikimedia trainers (principally Ally, the Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland) was on hand to provide assistance, and our librarians ( Marshall, Gavin and Grant) provided specialised materials focusing on the subjects covered.

Knowledge was shared openly. Articles were created or improved. Networks of connections were made and shared topics of interest explored. Copious cake and cookies were eaten, and a fun time was had by all. We plan to do further events and some research to maintain and sustain momentum and support our fledgling crowd community. In December, at the EduWiki conf Ally reported that she had not seen much engagement from University of Edinburgh in Wikipedia projects . At least that’s changed.

The hashtag was #ILWeditathon. Read Our story in a storify

Articles improved

Articles created

February 21, 2015

crowdsourcing and communities

Women Singing at a Table (Waulking the Cloth)
by Keith Henderson http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/women-singing-at-a-table-waulking-the-cloth-94160

I have been in several meetings this week discussing crowdsourcing and citizen science models for Edinburgh. The terms are often being used interchangably even though they really shouldn’t.

Remembering my time at Oxford I was thinking of the Oxford Community Collection model. This is a model of working we developed to support any organisation in creating a shared collection of digital asssets through online crowdsourcing and personal interaction.

The beauty of the model is that it combines large-scale online crowd-sourcing with personal, individual interaction. The model allows contributors to choose the way they contribute to a collection, offering those who lack the resources, ability, or opportunity to use computers an opportunity to be part of a digital initiative, sharing their material with the world.

The model also includes a real emphasis on planning for with sustainable success. Being part of and interacting with a community is central. This is described and discussed in more detail in RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online (2011), a report which presents a simple A, B, C of advice for projects:

Aim for Two-way engagement;
Be part of your community;
Challenge your assumptions.

In finding a unique approach at Edinburgh the fact that we have our successful MOOC learner communities has been mentioned. It’s no longer about what you can get 100,000 people to watch or read, it’s about what you can get them to make , do, add and share. And it’s about being part of your community. More on this later.