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

I recently had the opportunity to have lunch with Calgary based blogger Kempton Lam, who recently co-authored a great case study of iStockphoto with Nisan Gabbay at Startup Review.

I really enjoyed meeting Kempton and while we discussed a lot of topics, one of them that I wanted to explore was community production versus crowdsourcing.

iStockphoto was mentioned in the original Wired article on crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe has recently interviewed one of iStockphoto’s top contributors, Quebec photographer Lise Gagné. Jeff does a good job with his discussion of iStockphoto from the perspective of crowdsourcing. Production of work performed by a crowd of individuals. His interview with Lise unfortunately doesn’t discuss the interesting aspects of the iStockphoto community that make this company successful.

Kempton’s case study discusses how important the community that formed around iStockphoto was to their success.

Fostered a loyal and active community

iStockphoto was started as a hobbyist site by founder Bruce Livingstone and it remained so for several years. The fact that iStockphoto wasn’t created as a business venture from the start was a big factor in iStockphoto’s success. In many ways it parallels the start of another popular online community, Craigslist. Just as Craig Newmark’s personality has had an influence on Craigslist, so too has Bruce’s personality and passion for photography had an influence on the iStockphoto community. Bruce was always a core user of the site, and as such attempted to nurture the needs of its users.

I think this is a great example of community production. The differences between community production and crowdsourcing as concepts requires some work. I’ve touched on this topic before in my interview with Hugh McGuire from Librivox.

For right now, here are some of the properties I think distinguish community production from crowdsourcing (more to come…)

• Something to believe in - Open source, Librivox, Creative Commons and Wikipedia are all examples of a community forming around some common community cause that surpases any single entities interests.

• Community interactions are integral to how production occurs - Librivox works because of the community. If a company uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to hire contract laborers to read public domain books then crowdsourcing might have occurred - but there is no community involved with the production of the audiobooks.

• Sharing for a common cause - Even in the case of iStockphoto there is a sharing of work for the common cause of creating a marketplace of affordable royalty free photos. Flickr users share for different reasons, but there is a common community that has formed around sharing. The open business competition conducted by Goldcorp had no sharing among competiting teams, no common community cause.

My friend Hugh McGuire has a new blog TextoSolvo where he is exploring some of the same concepts of community based open collaborative projects. As the community leader of the Librivox project he has a lot of experience to add to this conversation. Check out his project outline that includes the concepts he plans to explore.

Community production is at the heart of what we are working on at Project Ojibwe, so you can expect more posts exploring various aspects of community production.

On Mon 4 Dec 2006.