Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between organic gift communities that undertake social production and crowdsourcing. I made my previous post on the topic of crowdsourcing a day before I had the pleasure of having lunch with Montreal author, entrepreneur and the first person to utter the word Librivox, Hugh McGuire.

If you are not familiar with the Librivox project, it is a community of volunteers that record books in the public domain into audiobooks that they release back onto the net. It is a great example of community production.

Wired contributing editor Jeff Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing has a blog where he is exploring different models of crowdsourcing and community production. I thought I would contribute to the conversation with a series of posts & interviews on various models of community production.
I decided to interview Hugh on his thoughts on crowdsourcing and community building after he left the following comment on my previous post,

Apart from the unfortunate outsourcing connotation, crowdsouring completely misses this point (which is something I have thought a lot about at LibriVox):

that what goes *in* is more important than what comes *out*.

crowdsourcing sounds like it is about extracting resources from a crowd (like a strip mine, exploiting resources)… when in fact the real power (and beauty) is in creating a community that wants to contribute *into* something.

crowdsourcing = clearcut
???? = community gardening

i don’t know what the ???? is (and frankly don’t care). but if you look at successful ???? projects, I think you will find common elements that crowdsourcing doesn’t catch:

a) people want to contribute to the public sphere (with idealist motivations)
b) participating in the project becomes a highly social, almost family-like activity

in short, the opposite of crowd, and the opposite of sourcing.

apparently this guy has written about this stuff, but I have not read him:
http://www.benkler.org/

(he calls is commons-based peer production)

maybe: scatteredbuilding …nah. buzzwords suck.

Hugh is right, Yochai Benkler’s book the Wealth of Networks, is required reading for anyone thinking about Web 2.0 and the architecture of participation. Here is the interview.

Q: How many people have contributed to the LibriVox project ?

We have about 2,500 people signed up on the forum.
Probably 25% have never posted; 25% post once and disappear; but I would say we currently have about 1250 people who have or will contribute at least one recording.

Of those 1250, probably about 250 are active at any given period of time. And behind the scenes we have about 20 hard core Librivox volunteers who manage the project. These hours no one sees really, but they are really amazing. The work these background admins and “meta coordinators” do is impressive.

Q: How many hours of audio have been recorded through the project ?

just did some quick calcs: I estimate we have about 1,500 hrs of audio.

Q: How many books ?

we have about 180 full length books, plus another 100 or so poems and short works, representing about 4,500 individual audio files. this is *completed* works. In fact work into LibriVox is roughly double this, because of all the projects in-progress:

12 plays
50 collaborative project
200 solo projects (50% ? of these will not get finished)…

so a total of, say about 162 incomplete full-length works, avg 50% complete, adds another 2000 hrs, roughly.

Q: How many hours do you estimate it takes someone to create an hour of audio ?

quick rule of thumb 1 hr librivox audio = 3 hours of recording & editing. and I would say that behind every book there is minimum 6 hours of management, cataloging file fiddling, fixing etc. Not including general forum chatter. our books have an average length of 8 hrs, so I would estimate that each book is, roughly, 30 hours of work.
For our catalog that’s about 5,400 hours of volunteering.

(This doesn’t include all the website management etc that happens as well, which I would not be able to estimate, except to say it is in the 1000s as well).

Q: If you were to advise someone thinking about ‘crowdsourcing’ as part of their business strategy - what advice as someone who has successfully created a community of participation would you give them?

1. make the goal clear and simple. people must know what they are doing, and believe in it. (austin’s emphasis)

2. focus on the people, not the results.

i cannot speak for any other project, but at librivox i/we have always defended our readers *over* the “quality” of our recordings. that is: many people said: “you should have auditions,” “you should not let certain readers read because they are no good,” “having different readers on one book is annoying” etc. But we always said, we will accept *any* reader, we don’t care how “good” you are: if you love a book and want to read for us you are welcome.

the result is that we have many great audiobooks, some pretty good audiobooks, and maybe a few stinkers (tho I haven’t heard one stinker). and an army of people who have liberated books they love into audio.

personally, I think our value is almost more as a place where people can come and read together, than it is as project building an audiobook library. If no one ever listened to a LibriVox book, I would still think the project has been a huge success.

At the end of the day people continue to participate in LibriVox because it is fun. Becuase they enjoy hanging out on LV forums. Becuase we have created a community focused around a common goal. I have not spent time on other forums, but i am told we are very different from other net communities in how … nice we are.

There are many other reasons (the openness of the project, the fine people who built the systems that make it easy, the welcoming atmosphere etc), but at the end i think the focus is on:

1. clear
2. fun
3. easy
4. open

Hugh gets it. He also happens to be the founder of a cool montreal startup Collectik.

Go check out the good work the volunteers at LibriVox are doing. You can also read up more on the project with this great interview.

I just downloaded The Dawn of Canadian History : A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada. I consider it an opportunity to do homework for my new project Ojibwe.

On Mon 30 Oct 2006.