Session Title: Leveraging the Community: Crowdsourcing from the Grassroots Level
Presenters: Stevie Rocco, Communications Support Coordinator, Penn State University
Brian Panulla, Director, Extreme Events Lab Center for Network-Centric Cognition and Information Fusion
Time & Date: 11:15 A.M. - 12:00 P.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C100
Session Description: “Crowdsourcing” refers to”the act of taking a task traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” (Howe, J. http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/). At Penn State, individuals are taking advantage of the open Web through the utilization of Web 2.0 technologies such as Twitter to create communities to crowdsource projects from a grassroots level.
Normally bound by the barriers of units and organizations within a large University, these tools have broken down silos to the extent that the community can leverage itself to create projects outside of the normal institutional structures. This paper will be a case study to discuss the methods behind the rubriKit project, a rich-internet application developed from the grassroots of Penn State?s education and technology community.
Included in this project are the inherent challenges in working across different fields (education and technology), across different organizational structures (faculty vs. staff, cost-recovery vs. centrally supported), and without a budget in order to build a tool that supports faculty and institutional assessment. Questions addressed in this paper will include: what our informal team has applied from the open source movement; how Web 2.0 tools organize and serve the collective; what we have learned by cooperating across different fields on tools and technologies for education; how we can leverage the larger community to deliver tools and services enabling sharing within traditional institutions. By working to explore these questions we have created not only a critical toolset in the rubriKit, but have introduced a model for intra-institutional cooperation that can be reused to support new unfunded initiatives.
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Prezi presentation from our talk is at the link above.
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