Introduction

This is our suggestion for a future Design Challenge program. With our proposal we aim for supporting people who want to create new and exiting designs for applications or web services. We support bringing in high quality input, concentration on the design of interactions. We help to give each other valuable feedback.

Process

During the whole process Mozilla staff supports the participants via regular chat sessions and by giving comments and help. Special events like webinars are highly valued by participants. If we have the possibility to do them they make the most sense in the research phase.

Pre-Challenge

The process starts with project suggestions by Mozilla: A list with possible topics for the next challenge is posted on the Mozilla webpage a sufficient time before the actual challenge starts. Everybody who comes by can vote for the topic selection. The best scoring project is selected to be the next challenges topic. We do this in order to involve the community early in the process to create commitment and prevent challenges to be selected that don’t attract participants. It is also important to do this step to guarantee that the topics proposed are truly relevant to the development of different projects in Mozilla.

General Setup

The registered participants can participate in the challenge. The work’s results during all process phases will be collected and worked with via our future design challenge website. We decided to structure the process into phases. This gives structure and encourages continuous involvement. Also creates a mental-model of how the whole process works (from 0% to 100% completion). Each phase has a deadline. After its passing, the possibility to upload material for the next phase is unlocked.

Research

The first phase in the challenges will be research. In the step the participants gather resources on the challenge topic: Weblinks, own findings from interviews, other products that have a similar purpose etc. It can be voted on the usefulness of resources. This first step gives a good base for the design process and makes the final proposal to be developed more professional. Mozilla can even create its own repository for design material or a design guide (similar to the Nokia Forum resources).

Idea Gathering

The next phase will be idea gathering: The community gathers ideas and inspiration on how the problem can be solved and user goals met. Like in the research phase everything goes into a common pool that is available to everybody on the platform. Teams are best formed in this phase. We support this by providing the possibility to assign ones name to a idea. So if a group of people likes the same idea(s) they can form a team if they want.

Design Phase

After the idea gathering ended, the work on the final designs will start. People can do this either alone or in teams. Each team or person will have their own space for working on their ideas. Other people still can view the uploaded mockups and can comments on these. Besides of comments there is the possibility to vote on different aspects of the designs like efficiency of use, utility and ease of learning.

A common problem is that polished graphics displace the focus on interaction. (see Don Normans Essay on Design Competitions). Since simple sketches like balsamique-mockups are effective for demonstrating the interaction-design ideas, the sketch-style will be the form in which contributions will be submitted. This could be encouraged by making a descent mockup-tool available for participants.

Evaluation

The best concepts are selected by a jury formed by Mozilla staff and “external” people e.g. from organizations or universities. A short and objective profile about these people are posted from the very beginning of the challenge. The evaluation needs to be written in a way that allows participants future improvements if they want to carry on with their ideas.

Between Challenges

In between the challenges ideas from the previous challenges can be realized. For people who want to do so, contact to the add-on community would be provided. The platform can still be used for further improvement of the ideas.

As the community carries on between the challenges winning awards is not the only possibility to get recognized: if a team archives great results after the challenge has passed there is still the possibility that their project could be e.g. featured on the Labs blog, and it is possible to get the staffs’ feedback on these concepts.

In case it makes sense for the UX-Team the community could participate in some “real-world” tasks like finding out a way around minor certain problems in the GUI. People will feel valued and the team could get new solutions.

Voting and Rewards

It can be commented and voted on all submissions in all phases. A common problem is that voting up/down does not give any help for future improvements. Because of that our wording will be more specifically and voting possibilities differentiated: comments can be marked as “helpful” and ideas and concepts are valued with up-votes on “ease of learning”, “efficiency” and “utility”. The wording prevents voting without meaning. The different categories for the concepts allow to see whether oneself meets the usability goals one wants to archive.

We want to encourage collaborative work, not a strong competition. So the participants don’t get a score on how good they are. Instead they get a kind of pie-chart, showing what they are good in. This prevents people getting asked all the time (high score) or never (low score) for feedback or being in a team. Others can look as well for somebody who is good in a certain thing to form a balanced team or get feedback on a certain topic.

Participants are rewarded with badges. They are mainly a motivator for individuals and not replacing the points in a kind of way that “many badges people” are perceived as “better people”.

In this blog post the participants from team 2 describe their ideal platform and thoughts which went into this:

Introduction

Having analyzed current practices in crowdsourcing across dozens of sites, our team summarized what we concluded were the best practices for a successful crowdsourcing site. You can view the full summary here, but to summarize the summary, our list includes:

• Low barrier to entry for participation
• Business Incentive: competition
• User Incentive: intrinsic motivation
• Give people the ability to shine
• Community
• Some aspect of fun

From there we decided to narrow our brainstorming and focus on three features that would help make this product embody some of these best practices and create a delightful user experience. At the same time, we ideated on what the eventual end product would look like that has these three features and what Mozilla could be doing to create a crowdsourcing platform for their design challenges and how that might become a open-sourced crowdsourcing tool.

Here are the three features we think would be good to include in the crowdsourcing end product.

Low Barrier to Entry

How can we make it easy, engaging, and welcoming to join crowd-sourcing challenges? We need to minimize the hustle of signing into the project.

Today many website offer a sign in through your Facebook/Twitter account as that saves you the trouble of filling in your personal details (name, email, etc) while also providing a secure login. We predict this method for registration will be the new standard.

Another benefit from using Facebook as your “signing in passport” is that the new member is “bringing with him all of his friends to the crowdsourcing website” which means it lets you invite your friends from Facebook to engage and follow the members activities by rating or commenting on your work via Facebook invitations/alerts.

By giving access through an almost universal social network, the user gains ease of use, security, and access to his social network for related social features.

Characterization

Also a very important aspect of “signing in” to a crowdsourcing website is to identify the new member and his fields of interests. This allows the site to better provide relevant content to the user, such as information on challenges that are in his “world of content”. From phase 1 we came up with important features and functions a successful crowdsourcing service needs. Users interests and expertise must be captured and linked in a convenient way. We thought on developing a characterization system which will be a mash-up of existing crowdsourcing sites. Fun and engaging questions will identify the users areas of expertise and interests, much like how Hunch creates a characterization of the user through surveys.

This will allow to attract new users in a fun way to characterize them. Knowing the users better leads to better catering/advertising/information about challenges within the crowdsourcing service the user might be interested in.

A new visual challenge for submissions

In the cases where challenges/contests are determined by user voting (or at least user voting is involved), there are some aspects that could make the experience more satisfying to use. Additionally we discussed some new ideas that may make the experience more delightful.

• as with any participation, being able to vote without having to sign up or register will increase participation significantly
• clearly indicate how their participation mattered, that their participation was recorded, and what their information will be used for
• in terms of presentation of submissions for those looking to rate submissions, it should be random but provide the option to sort the submissions by popularity or other variables. (maybe not linearly, but in batches – i.e. “what’s hot” or “featured”). It was mentioned that this could be done by making each entry like a node network and people build off each other by adding nodes. Larger nodes would denote more popularity. This is a great way to visualize a large number of submissions (e.g. see pearltrees.com).

In terms of graphic design, the graphics should not be complicated in order to reduce server load and load time for the user. The node network idea could be great if it didn’t have to be done in Flash or a ton of JavaScript to avoid lack of performance. HTML5 as technology could be a good start.

End Product

Thinking about the end product for the project, we envision it as a crowdsourcing platform that will serve Mozilla for their crowdsourcing needs in a different way than all the other crowdsourcing practices that are currently on the web. This new platform will be written as open source so whoever wants to use it can take the code, adjust it to his own needs, and use it to build his/her CS platform.

Being a Mozilla platform and hopefully a Mozilla product, the platform would be a community crowdsourcing practice where all the participants can improve each others work and collaborate in an open innovation atmosphere similar to the Wikipidia and Linux communities as opposed to the other kinds of crowdsourcing platforms that we identified in Phase 1 (market-place CS, crowd-funding, and CS data-mining).

In response to our open call Billy May, in early 2009, produced a throw-away concept for an “Open Web Concept Phone”. Working directly off of that community feedback, Billy has since finished the exploration with his concept “Seabird”.

The following write-up is by Billy May and explores what an Open Web phone might look like:

Concept Series: Seabird

Also available in 3D on YouTube (cross-eyed/red-cyan/etc):

Overview

The Mozilla Seabird, part of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, is an experiment in how users might interact with their mobile content as devices and technology advances. Drawing on insights culled from the Mozilla community through the project’s blog, a focus quickly developed around frustrating physical interactions. While mobile CPUs, connectivity and development platforms begin approaching that of desktops, the lagging ability to efficiently input information has grown ever more pronounced.

Interaction

The Seabird, then, introduces a few possibilities into how user interaction might evolve with the advancing motion capture and projector driven innovation in the market. First out, the Seabird imagines how a multiple use dongle might augment the crowded gestural interface with greater precision and direct manipulation of content in 3D space.

Pico Projector

With mobile phone companies such as Samsung, LG and Motorola moving towards display applications for projectors, the technology remains open for expanding user interaction and input at the same time. The Seabird, on just a flat surface, enables netbook-quality interaction by working with the projector’s angular distortion to deliver interface, rather than content. With the benefit of a dock, each projector works independently and delivers laptop levels of efficiency.

Design

The form development took its cues from various aerodynamic, avian and decidedly feminine forms. Its erect posture intends a sense of poise while its supine conformity to the hand reconciles that with the user’s desire for digital control. The curvature of the back also serves a functional role in elevating the projector lens elements when lying flat.

Seabird is a community-driven exploration and does not mean that Mozilla has plans to produce an OS or hardware at the moment. Find out more about Mozilla Firefox for Mobile here.

Download pictures in high resolution and print quality.

FAQ

Who created this project?

Seabird was created by Billy May, a Mozilla Labs community member who in early 2009 created an initial vision of what an Open Web mobile phone could look like. Seabird is Billy’s followup project in which he incorporated the feedback he received from the wider community on his first throw-away concept. To learn more about Billy May, please visit his homepage.

How does this relate to Mozilla / Mozilla Labs?

Billy is a community member in the Mozilla Labs community and created Seabird in his spare time. Seabird is not a Mozilla or Mozilla Labs project but part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The Concept Series provides a place for the wider community to create and collaborate on projects which push the boundaries of the Web and the browser.

Does Mozilla have plans to produce a mobile phone?

No. Mozilla produces Firefox for Mobile, the popular Firefox browser for mobile phone systems such as Nokia Maemo and Android. You can find out more about Mozilla Firefox for Mobile here.

Key Learnings – Status Quo and Gaps

Team 1 sent out a questionnaire form to all those who had participated in any Mozilla Labs Design Challenges. Thirty-seven past participants answered – thanks to all of them for supporting us!

Many of the participants had either a design (14) or Computer Science (10) academic background. In analyzing our outreach we had some interesting findings: The majority of participants found out about the Challenges through the Mozilla Labs website, others found out through blogs, news websites, or through their university. Though Twitter is supposed to be a popular and widely used service among designers or programmers, only 3 got to know about the challenge via twitter!

The majority of participants valued video as an efficient medium of explaining the Design Challenge brief, and almost everybody was satisfied with the information they found on the Mozilla Labs website concerning the Challenge.

93% felt they received good support from Mozilla. When asked about the evaluation of the submitted designs, 73% found the evaluation to be transparent and fair. Those who felt otherwise noted an inconsistency in judges providing feedback, while others expressed concerns on the voting system for submitted designs being gamed by participants recruiting friends to vote for particular submissions.

Since work in UX covers a lot of different topics we were interested if people worked in teams – less than a third did so which means that those who did the work alone are the majority but teamwork is nevertheless a common way of work that needs to be considered in our concepts.

As it would be great if people would carry on with their involvement in mozilla projects, we asked if they carried on with their work on the designs after the callenge. One third did this in one or the other way. Some tried to implement an extension while others said that the ideas they developed were integrated in other designs later.

When asked whether they would be interested in participating in future Design Challenges, 89% responded positively, and 84% responded they would recommend participation to their friends or colleagues.

The last point to talk about is a very important one: What were the motivations of the participants?
The most common answer (several could be given) was “furthering personal knowledge” (87%), followed by “Recognition” (56%). Analysing coherences in our data we found out that Resume-Building was more common among design students than among the ones with other academic backgrounds.

Reading Crowds

This post summarizes research done by Piyush Kumar, Eugenia Ortiz, Chao Xu, Ajay Roopakalu, and Peter Organisciak.

What do we know about crowdsourcing? Certainly, its historically roots of group collaboration dig deep, but what of its current form? It is only in recent decades, as communications technologies became more efficient at connecting large groups of people together that we started seeing (if not yet noticing) ever larger, more dynamic creation and problem-solving by geographically dispersed people. Free software arrived, message boards arrived, wikis arrived… tech savvy people were becoming more comfortable working together while their tools for doing so became easier. Yet, still no satisfactory way of framing the big picture.

This is why when Wired published The Rise of Crowdsourcing in 2006, the term was quickly appropriated, a society collectively finding the words to tie this phenomenon together. In the article, Howe was looking at a very particular facet —crowd-power business— but only days after it was published, he admitted that the term had been appropriated, twisted and stretched. Crowdsourcing was the utilization of the wisdom of the crowds that James Surowiecki had popularly argued for. It also began to be used as an umbrella for many more specific facets that observers and theorists had been noticing. Most importantly, it was a verb. Crowdsourcing is not a product, it is a means; a way to do something.

As a tool, arguing about crowdsourcing is pointless without a context. It is not: Is crowdsourcing good, but rather, is crowdsourcing good for this or that task? The buzzword-free version of that question is simply, what sorts of things are good to asks large online groups to help with?

We’ve often heard of crowdsourcing projects, especially the venerable Wikipedia, as being impossible in theory but possible in practice. So, as theory is running to catch up to what is being observed, my team looked at what it is saying, looking for any sorts of patterns.

Findings

There are multiple ways that crowds can gather. These include:

• Broadcast search: This type of crowdsourcing is when you broadcast a problem to a large number of people and they try to solve it. Essentially, the Internet here doesn’t change much from what you would do offline, except that you can ask more people. An example of broadcast search is contest sites (Innocentive, Crowdspring), where a party with a problem puts up a bounty for it to be solved, and the best design wins the prize. There have been different terms for this, but I find Karim Lakhani’s Broadcast Search (pdf) to be particularly apt.
• Commons-based Peer Production: This is the term, coined by Yokai Benkler, to describe when people get together to create together, sidestepping traditional organizational structures.
• Knowledge/Opinion Aggregation: When people combine what they know or experience, such as with Wikipedia. This is something truly unique to the Internet, at least on the scale that we can do it without it costing ridiculous amounts of money or bringing the project into chaos.

One consistent observation that crowdsourcing projects find is that just a small fraction of contributors make up a major fraction of contributions (Flickr Commons, Galaxy Zoo, Wikipedia, Australian Newspaper Digitisation Project). This means that, most basically, there are two types of users to think about when crowdsourcing: heavy users and casual users. The spectrum between these two is gradual, but that is what it ultimately boils down to. It’s easy to see how heavy users are assets, but the contributions of casual users, in large numbers, add up too. Also, it could be argued that if your system doesn’t cater to casual users, then there won’t be capacity to find and connect to those power users.

How to motivate continued involvement is still being considered, and most current theory approaches the topic on a case by case basis. Considering the breadth and diversity of crowdsourcing projects, this may be an appropriate method, as it does not appear that there are all-encompassing rules for doing it right. Still, this fuzzy area is slowly growing clearer.

Most often, crowd motivation is separated into two forms: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is when one does an activity for its inherent satisfaction, such as for the fun or challenge of the activity, while extrinsic motivation is when their actions are fueled by external rewards or pressures. These are not mutually exclusive, and multiple forms of either motivation can be present in a task.

Intrinsic motivation can be both enjoyment-based or obligation/community-based. One way enjoyment is maximized occurs is when a person’s skill matches the challenge of a task. A task that is too difficult may cause anxiety, while too easy may cause boredom (pdf). Another form that enjoyment is derived from is creative task accomplishment. Amabile, in proposing this link between motivation and creativity, defines a creative task as one that is heuristic (no identifiable path to a solution) instead of algorithmic (exact solutions are known) and novel and appropriate to the need. With obligation-based motivation, an individual is moved to act within the standards of the group within they’re working.

The importance of extrinsic motivation, however should not be underestimated, though. Money is one ever-reliable form. Projects absent from most other forms of motivation can still succeed with financial backing, albeit disingenuously. Another extrinsic motivator is in the product’s utility to the contributor. For example, somebody can contribute a function to an open-source product that they themselves need. Sometimes, there are also delayed benefits to participation; Lakhani and Wolf suggest the development of skills and career advancement. Recent, the development of social graphs online has encouraged the growth in popularity of achievements, with point and badge systems emergent from video games being applied to other types of systems. The gaming community is currently holding the discussion on achievements , but in the scope of my research, I found that achievements are nearly always a secondary motivator, strengthening the motivation of somebody already engaged rather than standing on their alone.

Though it may seem obvious, the passion of the users can’t be understated. If people like what the project is about, then they’ll participate. Galaxy Zoo recently classified its 60 millionth galaxy. Their success is greatly due to the interest of amateur astronomers. Australian Newspapers Project just reported a very successful pilot of crowd tagging and text correction in a project for digitizing Australian newspapers. There, amateur genealogists – a very dedicated community – found the project and realized that they were interested in its goals, contributing en masse to it.

Social movement theory talks about “mobilization potential” (Klandermans and Oegema, Motivations and Barriers 1987): how many people could potentially contribute and how many actually do. The idea is to focus on maximizing the numbers of those mobilized in relation to the potential. Don’t think about how to catch everybody, but rather: who would be interested, and how do *they end up at the site?*

“Those that view the crowd as a cheap labour force are doomed to fail.”” —Jeff Howe

Sincerity goes a long way: crowds don’t like being used. “For the common good” projects, such as charity, open-source, and education-based crowdsourcing, encourage people at least some of the way. Library of Congress, for example, found the altruistic angle to be successful. Lakhani and Wolf’s survey of Sourceforge users, however, found that it’s not just about the intrinsic reward of feeling good about contributing to Sourceforge; users often got something else that they needed (like money or a necessary product) out of it.

Building and engaging community is, for most projects, desirable. Howe talks about how Threadless and iStockPhoto put community first, commerce second. Consider the example of Netflix with the Netflix Prize, a million dollar reward for improvements to the recommendation algorithms. Netflix didn’t exert unfair, controlling rules on their participants, letting everybody keep their own intellectual property and simply license it to Netflix for the $1 million (and winners could go license it to competitors too). This may be a contributing factor to the remarkable generosity and communication that was seen among competing teams. These are but three examples, but the field is teeming with them; crowdsourcing relies on people, and thus works when participants are treated as people.

This is but a summary of what we found in reviewed the theory behind crowdsourcing. Understanding that this post just touches a facet of a sprawling area, we encourage you to post your thoughts or reactions in the comments. What do you think about crowdsourcing?

A few weeks ago a group of 15 students from all around the world embarked on a mission to create a new program around Mozilla Labs’ Design Challenges.

The group split up into three teams with each team focussing on one particular aspect of analysis: Past Design Challenges, best practices and existing research.

The write-up and summary below is a guest post from Jimmy Chion for group 2 – Best Practices:

The following are several main aspects that are characteristic of successful crowdsourcing sites/businesses and examples of businesses that employ the characteristic well. Included are a few other metrics that our group discussed.

Low Barrier to Entry

Easy access to contributing to the crowdsourced content is almost necessary for increasing participation among first-time users. Although a registered account gives more commitment and community for an individual to come back, it is a small hurdle that prevents many from using a site. One solution to this that we’ve seen in sign-in through accounts many people already/probably have, such as Facebook.

Examples:
Wikipedia – anyone can edit almost anything. In fact, the biggest barrier to entry for Wikipedia is its editing tools which many have criticized as un-user-friendly.
Kickstarter – Facebook sign-in and easy donation process encouraging small amounts of money.
Hunch – once you go onto the site, you are already contributing by answering 20 questions and developing your profile. It asks you to register to save the information. Tricky.

Business Incentive: Competition for top submission

Some of the best-known crowdsourcing businesses use many professionals to produce many solutions for a challenge. The submitter of the challenge picks the best one and pays only for that one. The business putting out a call for submissions benefits from the intense competition between the contestants. The best known sites of this kind are Innocentive and Crowdspring.

User Incentive: Intrinsic motivation

Apart from the external motivators (such as money, points, gifts), the crowdsourcer must implicitly appeal to the internal motivations of the participants to participate. This can range from recognition within a community, desire to share knowledge and opinions, to wanting to develop personal talents. The most successful sites create intrinsic motivation for the user to contribute to the crowd. People come back for the points, rewards, reputation, but the biggest motivator is people’s own motivations of desire to share (possibly show off).


Examples:
Wikipedia – seems like pure altruism, but is successful because it empowers the user to contribute something that they may be an expert on to many many people.
Ushahidi – crisis mapping. Aggregates knowledge (via sms, web) of where violence was occuring. Made into open source and used in Haiti and Washington, DC for snow fall. There is no other value to the contributers other than aggregating knowledge for the greater good.

Give people the ability to shine

This is usually done by diversifying the different tasks to be crowdsourced. By letting people contribute parts of the whole, the task is less daunting, and it also allows people to shine in what they’re good at. This point is also related to the previous one.

Examples:
OpenIDEO – breaks up the creative process and awards points at different phases in the project.
Quirky – similar to OpenIDEO, rewards proportionately to whatever parts of your contributions are successful
Wikipedia – probably the best example where people are given their ability to share whatever unique knowledge they have.

The following are aspects that are great but not entirely necessary for a successful crowdsourcing project

Community

The smaller the niche and the bigger the community, the more identified the user will feel. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and InnoCentive are great counterexamples though. The former two aim to be all-encompassing and general as can be, and the latter pretty much has no community (though the company has talked about nurturing it).

Examples:
Threadless – has a tight community of artists and tshirt consumers. The entire community helps each other refine designs and choose the best ones.
Quora – similar to Yahoo Answers, but for young silicon valley startup entrepreneurs. As a result, the community respects each other and the quality of answers are extremely high unlike Yahoo Answers and Facebook Questions.
OpenIDEO – collaboration is two of the four phases in its process.

Some component of fun

Adding a playful or fun aspect to the whole experience gives more reason for users to participate and come back.

Examples:
Google Image Labeler – Users earn points for trying to label an image the same label as what other people would label it as. Turned something entirely boring into a game.
Hunch – A decision engine driven by user surveys. Who doesn’t love filling out surveys about themselves in order to find out more information about themselves they supposedly don’t already know?

Our compiled list of crowdsourcing initiatives can be found at here

Team 1 “Status Quo”: Analysis of current Design Challenge(s) (by Jan Dittrich)

Setting the foundations for the future of crowdsourcing at Mozilla a group of students from all over the world currently analyses crowdsourcing. For doing so, we split in three teams. The one I am in takes a look at the past efforts of Mozilla to involve people with a focus on design and UX: The Design Challenges. Since Spring ’09, Mozilla announced several challenges focusing on different topics, from chromeless browsing to social contacts in the browser. Until today, more than 1000 people participated.

The “Past Challenges analysis”-Team is taking a closer look at these past challenges. Soon a to-do list was set up which we collaboratively wrote. We started our work by collecting and reviewing resources like an analysis of past challenges conducted by Mozilla and an overview about possible good and weak points in the past challenges. An idea which emerged soon was to create a questionnaire for former participants. For doing so we set up page to brainstorm a set of questions.

An important part of the process of working together are the weekly team meetings: They offer the possibility to get feedback from Pascal, to ask participants who deal with other topics for an opinion and most importantly to discuss the focus for the upcoming week’s work with your teammates. The group I am in decided e.g. to focus the questionnaire on getting to know what motivated former participants in the past challenges and the deadlines for getting it ready to be send out — just a few minutes ago I had a look on our page and saw that two other teammates commented on the selections of questions. So after chatting tonight (at least in my timezone!) I think we will have the questionnaire ready to be send!

Team 2 “Best Practices”: Analysis of other (successful) Crowdsourcing Initiatives (by Coleman Foley)

Now that we have compiled a list of relevant crowdsourcing projects, we are fleshing out each entry by seeing how they score on a variety of metrics. From there, we are further condensing and making sense of our data by making a list of best practices. Both these lists are editable by anyone in the group, I should note. Perhaps the crowdsourcing project we are learning the most from is the one we are all participating in—the “crowdsource crowdsourcing” project. I have learned that while decentralization is good, some direction is nice, too. Each of our group’s chats have been most productive when we followed even a loose agenda. Fortunately, every body in our group has come through at some time with some leadership at the right time.

In our first few days, we established a great deal of breadth, adding many projects to our list. Now we are getting into a few projects in more depth focused on best practices in their services. One is Threadless, which gets t-shirt designs from its active community. Another is Quora, the new social question and answer service that is still in private beta. Threadless has showed us the value of structure. Every week it picks that week’s best designs and rewards them. It also puts on themed contests, like comics or coffee, which keep things fresh. Quora has showed the trade-off between quality and quantity. While it has a lot better answers and less spam than Yahoo Answers, it also has far less content. We will continue to learn about these projects and our own. Coeval we will figure out best practices and metrics of already existing crowdsourcing projects to see how they mesh with the other team’s findings on Sunday.

Team 3 “Theory”: Key learnings from theoretical body of knowledge

As you may know, we are part of the group for the new Mozilla Labs’ project “Crowdsource Crowdsourcing”. The project’s aim is to build the next crowdsourcing platform by learning existing theory, analyzing current best practices, developing ideas and, of course, experimenting.

We are a group of students with heterogeneous profiles, universities and countries: Ajay Roopakalu, Piyush Kumar, Chao Xu, Peter Organisciak and Euge Ortiz. We come from different areas like computer science, engineering, mathematics and design.

We call ourselves, quite creatively, “Team 3”; this is apt because we do, after all, work as a team. We are responsible for for the theoretical aspect of the project, examining the body of crowdsourcing knowledge. We all come from different disciplines, so is our mission to make sure that we all know what we are talking about and that we are going in the same direction. In our write-board you can find discussions about theories and concepts of crowdsourcing, open innovation, motivation, collaborative work, among others.

Right now we are analyzing, discussing and putting everything together in order to have a solid base for the next phase, and that is the brainstorming phase. Our next step is to communicate our work with the big group and then to the community.

We are all excited about this project, the Design Challenges are a great way to involve participants and encourage their creativity and innovation. Crowdsourcing is a tool, and by building it right, we can use it to great ends.

Without much further ado – the Best in Class honors go to:

• Amine Zafri for Best in Class: Utility (for the solution that has the highest overall utility)
• Bianca Pamplona & João Menezes for Best in Class: Design (for the solution that has the most visually expressive concept)
• João Menezes for Best in Class: Risk Taker (for the solution that tests the limits of current thinking)
• Toby Shorin for Best in Class: Producible (for the solution that would be the easiest to ship to users immediately)

And the People’s Choice Award (as voted by the wider Mozilla Labs community) goes to:

• Toby Shorin

Congratulations to all participants, the winner of the People’s Choice Award and the Best in Class honorees in this Design Challenge!

Head over to the Design Challenge page and see the winning concepts.

- Pascal on behalf of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Team

This is a guest post from Coleman Foley, one of the participants in Mozilla Labs’ Crowdsourcing Project:

Today, volunteers from California to Sweden came together to discuss how to improve crowdsourcing, responding to a call from Mozilla Labs for volunteers to “Crowdsource Crowdsourcing“. We are practicing what we preach here. Pretty much everybody had a say in our initial discussion. Pascal Finette of Mozilla Labs got us going by telling us we should split up into three groups. From there, we took over. We got into the groups we wanted, then each group chose its own way of communicating and decided how to proceed until all the groups reconvene in two weeks.

For example, my group, which is trying to define best practices for crowdsourcing, decided to sign up for and participate in some crowdsourcing sites, and to report back on Thursday with initial findings. A second group is analyzing past Mozilla Labs Design Challenges to figure out what went wrong and what went right. The third is diving into crowdsourcing theory. We plan to fuse our findings when we get back together.

We have a wide variety of interests and backgrounds here, with an entrepreneur, a biophysicist, an electrical engineer, a couple of psychology majors, and, of course, many designers and programmers.

• I am a computer science major at Chico State who is all about usability. I blog at colemanfoley.posterous.com.
• Roei Yellin is an Israeli entrepreneur working on a crowdsourcing startup.
• Matt Evans is Mozilla’s QA Director.
• Jan Dittrich is studying for a Media Arts & Design B.F.A. at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
• Abraham Taherivand has an Information Systems BS and an Information Management and Engineering MS. He has done a ton of things in innovation, which you can learn more about at his website.
• Jimmy Chion has a bachelors’s degree in Cognitive Science Stanford and is now near completing a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering.
• Chao Xu is majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at Stony Brook University.
• Piyush Kumar majored in Electrical Engineering and minored in Computer Science for his BS and is going to get an MS in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Ryan Bubinski is studying studying biophysics and computer science at Columbia.
• Peter Organisciak is working on an MA in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta and is going on to study Information Science at the University of Illinois. His thesis is on the motivations of crowdsourcing participants.
• Zach Williams is a Psychology major at Tarleton State University in Texas, with a passion for web design and user experience, which you can see at his beautiful website.
• Joao Menezes studies Graphics/Interaction Design at UNIVILLE University, Brazil. He has participated in several Mozilla projects.
• Ola Moller studies Social/Digital Media & Concept Development at Hyper Island in Stockholm. He has led and participated in two creativity crowdsourcing projects in Sweden, which you can learn more about at his website.
• Eugenia Ortiz (who goes by Euge) is another student from Argentina. She is big on User Experience. Learn more about her at http://www.eugeniaortiz.com.ar/.
• Ajay Roopakalu is a computer science major and applied mathematics minor at Princeton University. He blogs at http://jrupac.wordpress.com/.

This is how you crowdsource crowdsourcing: gather volunteers from every part of the world and many backgrounds, let them organize themselves, and watch the magic.

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