Thank god there are crowdfunding opportunities that are now helping to properly sponsor the work of under-compensated educators and school staff. I am so glad that I recently found DonorsChoose.org. It’s an online charity that allows public school teachers to post project requests – whether it’s new uniforms for the marching band or an updated OS for the school computers. Donors can then browse those projects and give to the ones that speak to them (and they can give a lot or a little – whatever makes sense – not whatever box of chocolates is least offensive). If a project reaches its fundraising goal, then DonorsChoose delivers the materials to the school and updates donors with pictures, thank you letters, and reports of how the money was spent.

It’s a great tool for educators, but it’s not the only one. The winner of 2011’s Hackathon whose challenge was to build new internet and mobile prototypes in 48 hours was a group that developed Somesha. Somesha is a web and mobile app allows patrons to sponsor kids in the classroom around the globe through verified charities. A crowdfunding solution for education through a crowdsourced contest. How about that?

Which is not to say that educators and partner programs can’t continue to use sites like Kickstarter. For example, a product called SkyLight has the capability to connect any smartphone to any microscope and upgrade even the oldest, saddest chemistry tool in the classroom into a multi-media device. It is a device specifically intended for those in the far flung corners of the earth and for students in the classroom. And it just got fully funded this month!

How else can crowdfunding help public education? What are some of your favorite projects?

That’s why my interest was particularly piqued when I learned about Waze. While most GPS systems work from algorithmic processes and incorporate information from complex databases and satellites, Waze takes commuting information one step further. It’s an app for download that’s available on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Nokia systems. Drivers type in their destination with the app open on their device and receive a choice of routes which drivers can select from (and save their preferences for future drives). It tracks speed, remaining distance, and time to your destination on a 3D map – like most other systems. However, Waze also works to create a community of cruisers who can actively report information through Waze as well; warning fellow drivers of accidents, speed traps, or upcoming traffic blocks. For an activity whose most exasperating component is often the sense of isolation in a sea of people – Waze is bringing community to the experience. You can take a tour of the app here.

Which got me looking into other crowdsourcing efforts around the traffic conundrum. Apparently, in India, cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kanpur, Bagalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and many others now have a Facebook page specifically dedicated to tracking traffic violations like this one. As Facebook users witness crime or violations, they are encouraged to post that evidence to the Facebook page and the traffic police will subsequently follow-up on the tip. One blog stated that a hit-and-run video posted on the Bangalore Traffic Police Facebook page received over 27,000 in just three days, which helped them track down the offending driver.

The question remains, however, if there is always a community to be created. Are people always going to helpfully indicate accidents to one another or just find new ways of lashing out in driver frustration? Is Facebook the best forum for citizens to deliver feedback about bad drivers? What do you think?

The proposed bills’ goals are to crack down on censorship and further combat copyright infringement. But it’s not the goals that Wikipedia and IdeaScale (and many other companies) find so menacing – it’s the language. The language is pretty murky and borders on encouraging censorship. It’s not something that most of the tech industry can get behind (including big names like Google and Facebook), since it basically misunderstands the power and purpose of the internet. And that includes IdeaScale – sure we want Hollywood to be able to reward its content creators fairly, but not at the cost of freedom of information. In any case, it is a bill that likely needs to revisit its composition before it can be assured of support.

Even if you weren’t thinking about SOPA before, it probably hit your radar today when Wikipedia went black. Wikipedia is the 5^th most popular website in the world with over 398 million unique visitors in ONE MONTH – available in over 270 languages. I’m sure a few folks contacted their representatives today when they hit the Wikipedia black out. What remains to be seen is how the government will respond. In any case, IdeaScale joins Wikipedia in opposing SOPA. For a good, short article that goes over the basics about SOPA and PIPA, click here.

What is the path to battling overseas copyright infringement? What are your thoughts on SOPA and PIPA?

Which is why IdeaScale has the mobile offering and it’s also why Ipsos is talking about IdeaScale:

 “The Ideascale mobile app adds more depth and color to customer feedback. Ideascale can host an ideation module within the community, creating a powerful dialogue with customers. Ideascale also facilitates real ‘point-in-time’ research. Using the app we can trigger location-based surveys to panel members within the hour, and get insightful and timely results back within 24-48 hours. This helps client get immediate feedback on specific events and happenings – we like to think of it as a ‘flash mob’ survey.”

Back in 2006, Gartner Research released a comprehensive report about “Customer Satisfaction Management” that said not only are customer thoughts that are gathered at the point of experience 40% more accurate than customer feedback that’s gathered 24 hours later, but response rates can also increase by as much as 12%.

If you’re interested in learning more about mobile application surveying and how companies are capturing the voice of the customer at the point of experience, Ipsos is offering a one-hour webinar on Tuesday, January 24^th at 10:30 a.m. PST. You can register here.

What do you think about the future of mobile research? What are your stories about reaching the customer at the point of experience?

The Executive Office of the President and the General Services Administration is working to increase the rate of change by introducing the National Dialogue on the Federal Mobility Strategy that launched just this week. It is an effort spurred by Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel who has called for a mobile strategy for the Federal government in order to “improve services to citizens, engage citizens in government, reduce costs, and increase employee productivity.”

Already ideas are pouring in order to make the suggestion deadline of January 20^th (just a week left, people) with suggestions as diverse as creating a Federal mobile virtual network to developing a shared services catalog. Anyone can join the discussion in hopes of contributing to the overall strategy, which will be drafted in 60 days and in place for deployment within 180 days. You can find out more about the initiative here.

What’s nice about crowdsourcing ideas and suggestions for our government is that it is one of our most recent developments that allows for online democracy – anyone can put their ideas on the IdeaScale platform and vote immediately for the ones that make the most sense to them. In a country where every voice counts and every vote is another chance to influence your government, there really isn’t a better (current) model for public dialogue than online idea management. That’s why IdeaScale has worked with a number of different government projects including the 2011 President’s SAVE Award and Open OSTP.

Do you think crowdsourcing is one of the best reflections of modern democracy? What would you contribute to the new Federal Mobile strategy?

The bill, of course, isn’t law yet. The Senate also introduced a bill in November that basically shares the same goals as HR 2930 with a few distinctions (including investment minimums and maximums, funding caps, and the Senate bill requires the use of an intermediary like Kickstarter to process the investments, among other things). However, the bill was read twice in December and is currently being referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. If it passes, it will be reconciled with the House and then referred to the White House. So it still has a ways to go. Scott Edward Walker wrote a very helpful article on what small businesses need to know about the House bill.

The bills couldn’t be more well-timed, however. If you’ve given to Kickstarter in the past year, you received an update from them this week about their year in summary. And it was a big one. All told, Kickstarter alone saw more than $99 million pledged in the past year (and Kickstarter is still less than three years old). In the past year, 65 crowdfunding platforms were launched around the world (80% of which are focused on creative or artistic projects). With these bills in the house, I’m sure that these numbers have nowhere to go but up, across all industries. Just before the year ended the TikTok project raised more than $942,000 for their project alone.

There are a number of tips to follow on how to succeed when sourcing funds through platforms like Kickstarter? What do you think some of the key elements are of a successful crowdfunding campaign? How do you think things will things change if the crowdfunding bill is put into law?

Take for instance 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, the motion picture interpretation of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The film itself is a collaborative effort between various filmmakers who are connecting from across the country and have documented the progress of the OWS in NYC and in its sister cities. The filmmakers will edit the entire piece together in the coming year and they’re looking to meet a Kickstarter fundraising goal of $17,500 in order to buy the hard drive storage and editing space that will allow them to begin that work. With just over a week left, the film is still looking to close the $5,000 gap.

Whether it makes its goal or not, 99% represents the new age of online film collaboration at all stages – from award-winning filmmakers amassing video online in their separate cities to the crowd’s contributions in the fundraising world.

There’s also Wundersound, a Portland-based meditational band that is looking for backing for it’s new album and associated documentary by January 5^th, also on Kickstarter but has a long way to go before it reaches it’s $200,000 goal with just two more days left.

And when the UK Film Council was abolished last March, British filmmakers were nervous about what the future of independent films would be. But already, filmmakers like David Reynolds have started looking to the crowd for help in funding their projects. And Reynolds’ The Underwater Realm (which met its fundraising goal on Kickstarter just two days ago) will now go into production. Reynolds says that his turning to the crowd had absolutely nothing to do with the UKFC closing its doors, “I have always been a bit uncomfortable with the ‘hand-out’ system, it leads us Brits to hide behind the banner of ’arty’ and ‘important’ films to get our films funded, instead of thinking about what audiences actually want to see.” And what do audiences want to see?

The Underwater Realm is a series of five short films that explore a humanoid race that has been living beneath the oceans for over 2,000.

What do you think about Kickstarter’s role in supporting the independent film community? What do you think are some of the best ways to include the crowd in film production?

Last month, a team of marine biologists, Scientific American, and the Citizen Science Alliance launched a project called Whale.fm, which invites anyone to listen to whale song and match it against other patterns in hopes of translating the complex Orca communications (similar to those of the pilot whale). It’s a highly-covered topic that has seen a generally warmly-received because of the possibilities it inspires, if not the ease of its user interface (I found it hard to contribute to the nuances of the translation…). But, imagine being able to listen in on the most intimate conversations between Orcas! Imagine being able to talk back…

As far as we know, this is the first crowdsourced project that has asked amateur marine biologists and sea life enthusiasts to try their hand at translating for an animal species. It’s not, however, the first time that the crowd has helped decode complex materials. The Zooniverse Ancient Lives project from earlier this year, for example, enlisted the crowd in translating ancient Greek scrolls. Ancient Lives has uploaded some ancient and crumbling papyrus scrolls and shared them with the online community in hopes that the crowd will be able to match certain characters and translate the aging script.

What qualifies the crowd for such advanced translation? As the Ancient Lives director Chris Lintott says “You don’t need to know Greek… you can transcribe these texts letter by letter. It’s just pattern recognition.” This is certainly one of the defining qualities of most crowd tasks: you don’t have to be an expert to sort through a pattern and you don’t have to be a marine biologist to help them make breakthroughs in Orca whale song. In other words, it doesn’t matter if it’s all Greek to you, as long as you’re presented with a well-designed translation interface and a good translation key.

What do you think about the Whale.fm project? What other tasks involve pattern recognition and might be well-suited to the crowd?

The Air Force, like most of the military is facing budget cuts in the near future. And, as a result, they have started launching numerous contests to continue to develop new, innovative technologies by offering reasonable prizes for crowdsourced suggestions that will still help maintain a strong military defense. The Air Force Research Lab teamed up with Innocentive and has already finished the Humanitarian Air Drop project and the Vehicle Stopper challenge with suggestions coming in from as far away as Lima, Peru.

This tactic, of course, is not limited to the military and has been around for awhile now. In 2009, when Unilever launched a crowdsourcing competition that invited fans to suggest creative marketing campaigns for the new product Peperami, not only did they get a brand new and strikingly offbeat campaign, they also reportedly saved 60% of their typical marketing costs.

In a recent Smart Company article, Ross Dawson (crowdsourcing guru), says that in fact, crowdsourcing is not only the temporary answer to budget setbacks, but certainly the emerging model for doing business in the future.

But naturally there are concerns about the extent of crowdsourcing’s ability to deliver: quality of work, knowledge transfers, privacy, but when the fat is already as trimmed as it can be and saving as much as 60% on costs is a possible outcome, we will undoubtedly continue to encounter more crowdsourcing in the coming year.

How do you think we can expect to see this growth manifest in 2012? Where do you think the opportunity is for the most savings when it comes to crowdsourced solutions?

Last week, Crowdfunduk uploaded a new report called “Crowdfunding is not just for Christmas – but it helps” that informs its audience that the peak of online giving occurred yesterday, December 22nd. This tallies with the rest of the Christmas trends that I see during the holiday season that not only are about putting presents under the tree, but are also about supporting causes that one believes in and giving back here at the end of the year (just in time to qualify for some tax-deductible donations as well). So I decided to take a little tour of other crowdfunding sites to see what sorts of holiday-themed giving opportunities there were.

On Kickstarter, I found 12 different holiday projects including an “It’s Chanukah!” music video and a musical Christmas tour for 25 musicians. Rockethub took me to a Christmas foodie extravaganza investment opportunity and a children’s picture book featuring some charming elves. IndieGoGo gave me the opportunity to help support hungry families over the holidays, several films, and the ability to gift our troops that are currently overseas. All of these not only make for great giving opportunities, but great gifts at this time of year and I wonder if projects launched on crowdfundingn sites have greater success during the December holidays.

What are your favorite holiday projects? How else has the crowd influenced the holiday season?

Anyways, it’s that time of year again and Ideascale would like to take a moment to wish all of you “Happy Holidays!” This holiday season, we are most grateful for our customers and friends all over the world.

Happy Holiday and all the best in the coming year,

The Ideascale Team