For my crowdsourcing project I chose the project 7 Billion Ideas, found here. A little about this project, “7billionideas exists to connect the 7 billion people on this planet with their own ideas, whether they are students, employees or entrepreneurs.”. I figured, I have had an idea sometime in my lifetime, I can contribute! Of course then you actually have to pull out those random ideas you’ve had while your straw broke in the middle of a movie at the theater, or a spice that would pull together the two foods you want to eat but do NOT mesh well on the same plate. This is exactly why the founder, David Harkin, founded the project. He believed that every day, countless ideas were created and then promptly forgotten by the 7 billion idea generators in the world (the idea being, collect and idea for every person on the earth right now).
There is a ticker on the front of every page going through the stats of the ideas. It reset at random times so I will never know what the actual extent of the stats are, but there are the ones I got before getting too frustrated.
Total ideas by women 2690
Total ideas by men 5564
Total ideas 33585
Total private ideas 25748
Total likes 64,949
Total dislikes so far 20671
Total comments 9186
Total lifestyle related ideas 4474
Total food/drink related ideas1462
Total sport related ideas 1003
Total tech related ideas 3776
Total interactions 128391
Total interactions 128391 my mind goes ding ding ding here… because if you add these to the 33,000+ “ideas” it seems like that that’s the actualy amount of ideas on the site. 161,976. This is because every time I or someone comments on another idea, that’s an idea right there. Especially if it is feedback on the actual idea instead of a “souds awesome!” comment. I commented on a lot of ideas, mostly because I had some negativity to vent out. But I tried to make them productive, for example:
Someone posted an idea that everyone wear bully buttons, buttons that demote bullying. This idea is so well intedned at heart, but there have been so many initatives such as wearing purple on national bullying days to recognize yourself as an ally and take a stand against bullies. I questioned the author of this idea, how would this button act differently than wearing purple? What kinds of initiatives and marketing could be behind it, who could wear it, what could they say, etc…
I feel like the follow up ideas on this site are just as important as the initial ideas, because ideas are meant to be watered and grown until they can flourish. That is what makes this project so great. I saw an idea suggesting that we should be able to connect two contacts on Linkedin, and the founder of the site commented that they will try to figure out a way to make it happen, and he suggested some follow up ideas.
I will definitely keep checking out this site and posting my ideas. Hopefully 7 Billion comes!
2 responses to “7 Billion Ideas”
It seems that in a community in which crowdsourcing encourages the development of applications to connect people around the world, there is no censorship on any ideas. The platform, 7 Billion Ideas, seems to be a great way for people to share ideas about first world problems and talk about products that would make society run more efficiently. This level of efficiency works towards developing solutions towards social as well as personal curtailments. Looking through the posts made on this site really make me realize the creativity of humankind and the different applications of each idea.
Why do you think many of the ideas stated on this platform have the goal of establishing social change? Also, do you think that since there is a lack of censorship on the ideas stated, does this lower the quality of the ideas on the platform?
Most crowdsourcing projects have a tight and controlled end goal. Annonate this document, find this answer, optimize this problem. The general model is to get a crowd of people to collobrate on a single task. This project is different. There are multiple endpoints for each user. I’m not sure how effective this is going to be in practice. Without heavy filtration and curation, any good ideas run the risk of being lost among a torrential flood of noise. The succesful crowd sourcing projects figure out how to coordinate hundreds if not thousands of people properly. At first glance, not sure if this project can achieve this.