One of the most original business ideas and buzzwords of recent years, the idea of crowdsourcing is that companies and institutions of all kinds use the internet to harness the wisdom of the many rather than relying on the expertise of the few. But how far can we rely on the electronic crowd, and how exactly does it all work?

Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine, first coined the idea of crowdsourcing in 2006 and comes to the ICA to talk about his new book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. Chair: James Harkin, ICA director of talks and author of Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking.

You can book tickets on the ICA website.

We’ll be there, and we hope we’ll be joined by Hans Van Brooklyn, the winner of our Coversourcing competition. Let us know if you’re coming along.

Part of the book has also just been extracted in WIRED magazine; the book is also available at an exclusive 40% off from rbooks.co.uk

So, after over 300 total entries, 12,000 visitors and over 20,000 votes, we have a Coversourcing winner.

Following a hell of a debate, including plenty of accolades, a fair dose of criticism and the odd black-eye, the panel vote has (just! – see below*) chosen Hans van Brooklyn’s ‘Ants’ as the UK’s Crowdsourcing cover.

Hearty congratulations to Hans for a fun, smart, original and intriguing design, which struck a chord with the judges for its strong aesthetic and commercial appeal.

This is not to say Hans had it all of his own way of course.

Serious competition remained in the form of Acejet, Amchu, Yonialter and Vicky Simmons who were all vying for the top spot before Hans ultimately came up trumps. (A special mention too for We Haz A Bizness Plan which I think struck a positive chord with all of us.)

With the final cover now chosen, there’s plenty of time to reflect on what’s been an eye-opening process. As a marketer for Random House, I have a vested interest in effectively communicating the various merits of a range of books, Crowdsourcing being one of tens of titles I am responsible for marketing across the year.

However, Jeff’s book was different – the Coversourcing promotion wasn’t designed with cynical marketing gimmick in mind. With apologies to the Random House employment gods, it’s not often you get the chance to work on books that genuinely appeal on a personal level – but Crowdsourcing did just that. Here was a book written by an editor at WIRED magazine about interesting stuff like Threadless, Netflix and how peer-power is driving the future of business. I loved it. And I figured other people might love it too.

So, in hooking up with apt it felt like it might be interesting to experiment and put the design for the cover as up-for-grabs out in the real world. It would be a cool way of illustrating some of the concepts of the book, we thought. Let’s see what happens, we said. Hell, it might even be fun. And so it proved to be. Sort of.

There were, after all, several downturns along the way. Being greeted with nothing but tumbleweed and the sound of a distant church-bell when I logged onto the site during the first weeks in January was the first. This was followed swiftly by a selection of less-than-pleasant comments from one or two about the quality of submissions and the merits of the process as a whole. Finally, there was the dreaded eligibility question and the, with hindsight, hilarious dispute with our own law-abiding legal department.
However, it’s safe to say that, for me, the upsides far outweighed the down. We’ve seen a fantastic level of creativity, and imaginative, well-thought-out design. We’ve instigated a fair amount of comment and debate, both positive and negative. And, most importantly, I hope we’ve got people interested in the concept of Crowdsourcing, and perhaps looking forward to reading Jeff’s book in August.

* In the spirit of disclosure, a post will follow on how the voting went down at the panel today… as will a post from Jeff as to how the whole coversourcing thing played out compared to other crowdsourcing endeavours… stay tuned!

If you are a blogger, and you want to get your hands on one of the copies, please send an email to coversourcing [at] aptstudio.com, including in the email – very important this – your snail mail address, and your blog address.

The first fifty people to email us with this info will be sent a copy of the first official printing in the next two or three months, probably around mid to late May, and obviously we’d love it if you blogged what you think of the book when you’ve read it. (If you really want to make us happy, please link back to this site and tag the piece “coversourcing”, but no sweat.)

The UK edition (that’s the one with the winning entry printed on the cover) will come out in late summer this year, and we’ll follow this up with details of what we’re offering to all entrants to the competition by way of saying thanks to you all.

This site will also continue to grow in the run-up to publication, so please make sure you’re either signed up on RSS, or that you keep checking back for updates.

We know that a lot of you just came by for the competition, but hopefully there will be a load of other stuff to keep you interested in the next few weeks.

Good luck – and don’t forget to come by for the announcement of the winner!

Cheers, and good luck!

We’ll be posting some more thoughts on a few things shortly. For now, I just want to say, how cool is this?

Once the submissions are closed, there’s another two weeks of voting to be done, so if you feel (like many appear to!) that the current Top 20 is unrepresentative, now’s the time to get in there, tell your friends, vote and make your choices heard.

The last few days have seen a flurry of activity, and we’ve even been forced to ban a couple of people who simply refused, despite many polite emails, to desist from rude behaviour. But we hope these last two weeks will see some really great design get its fair dues from the crowd.

As discussed the only way to open this competition up to entrants from outside the UK and Northern Ireland is to have our terms vetted by a lawyer specialising in the law of each territory (eg California and NY, Sweden, France, Japan etc). This is because we risk unlimited liability if our terms do not comply with the laws of each applicable territory.

Unfortunately, until the law catches up with and embraces the fact that the internet has no territorial boundaries I’m afraid there’s little more we can do.

They also gave us this note to place in the T&Cs, which have now been updated.

Notice to entrants:

Unfortunately we can only accept entries from residents of the UK and Northern Ireland. This is a real shame for us because there is a lot of amazing talent out there but our lawyers tell us there is nothing we can do. However, if you live outside the UK and Northern Ireland and you want to send in your design nevertheless, we will upload it with your consent.

You cannot take part in the competition but we may include your designs on the website, as well as crediting designers in Crowdsourcing and/or send him/her a signed copy of the book. We can’t make any promises, but this is the best we can do!

So there you have it. Sorry. We’re not yet sure if this means that anyone who isn’t from the UK or Ireland should withdraw their entries, or whether we should just remove voting from those which aren’t. Or, hopefully, neither. But it is a bummer.

For the moment, we’re suggesting that people upload their (new) entries with comments / notes in Flickr that make it clear if they aren’t eligible – and see what happens.

And yes – we will be trying to get something to reward all entrants… watch this space.

First of all, the voting. The voting system works by asking every visitor to give a score out of five to each entry, and as most people give most designs either a 1 or a 5, the scores tend to average out between 2 and 3 – the current top entry has a score of 3.22 out of 5, the 20th has 2.47.

One of the criticisms levelled at the voting system, which is entirely valid, is that new designs have their score artificially inflated by early high votes – a design with just two votes can go straight to the top of the chart. This is true, but it doesn’t usually stay there long, as it’s quickly voted down if it’s not worthy. This is the reason we decided when we set out the competition to have a two-week period after the entries had closed for voting to continue – we think this will even out some of the disparities between those who entered early and those who have only just arrived. But no system is perfect.

There have also been a few individuals who’ve taken it upon themselves to second-guess the judges and the competition, and vent at a number of other participants. We’re all for open and constructive discussion, but some of this has verged on the trollish, and we’ve emailed a few asking them to tone it down (in most cases they’ve been immediately apologetic and helpful). We will be being a bit more active in the comments ourselves, both commenting and taking steps against those who abuse others or us. This is supposed to be fun.

Then again, it’s the internet, and passionate argument is part of its DNA. Even on Threadless, one of the shining examples of the crowdsourcing concept (and a big part of Jeff’s book too), I’ve frequently been shocked by the viciousness of the comments, but I’ve been equally charmed by the quality of the work. (It’s worth noting that they use the same five-point voting system too, although they’re a lot less transparent in telling you the overall score.) To accusations that it’s a popularity contest, we can only reply… yes, yes it is.

Everyone has different ideas of what makes a great cover. Personally, I’m pretty enamoured with John Slade’s contributions, but what do I know? The fact that some designs that I consider great and some I consider complete dogs are all represented in the Top 20 makes me think the voting is working pretty well. If they all looked the same, something would be wrong. That’s the nature of the crowd.

So please, keep those entries coming in, keep voting, keep commenting (nicely!) – and remember, it’s a big experiment, none of us are sure how it’s going to turn out, and it’s certainly not over yet.

*

Update: To make it easier to keep up to date with the competition and with the Coversourcing blogs, we’ve created a dedicated RSS feed that brings them altogether: Coversourcing RSS feed. We highly recommend subscribing to this if you want to find out what’s going on – and who’s won!

Well, it’s getting busy out there. We’ve got 61 entries so far, with more coming every day.

This busy-ness is not without its problems however – we’ve already lost a few noble entrants out there. Some bowed out for unknown reasons (possibly because of some of the tough things being said in some of the comments – play nice guys – while others have ducked out because they were told (by the crowd) that their use of stock imagery had been used on previously published book jackets.

And on that note – a word about stock. The terms and conditions make it clear that entrants must:

be (a) the undisputed original work of the entrant, and (b) previously unpublished. Entries must not be unlawful or breach any third party right. Entrants will acquire the prior written consent of all relevant rights owners and all licensed work must be clearly and accurately accredited.

Now, we know a lot of you are designers (including one of you who said that being a designer means you “don’t read things like briefs”, let alone terms and conditions) – but this stuff is important. We know because Random House’s lawyers said so. This – along with the non-eligibility of non-UK residents – is probably the most important rule.

However, we know this may be crippling some of your creativity – those of who who prefer to use stock than originating your own imagery. So we’ve got RH to agree that you can use stock imagery so long as you provide the information we’ll need to clear it. Of course, if it’s out of the park expensive, it won’t wash, and this will be taken into consideration by the panel, and you won’t win. So really, the most original (read: originated) designs / illustrations / photos have an advantage, but we thought we’d clear this up.

The upshot is: please add a comment to your entry on this site citing (and linking to) the source for the image.

Other great news is that we’ve had our first collaborative-minded submission, with pagalina posting her artwork for others to build from. More please!

We also have our first LOLcatz entry.

Finally a word about comments. It’s great how vocal (and in the vast majority of cases, constructive and positive) you are all being. But there have been some fairly uncalled-for attacks on entries, which really isn’t what we’re looking for. Anyone can enter, anyone can comment – and anyone can win. So – please keep it polite and constructive – and keep it coming!