Could the crowd design a better car than Detroit?

Would it be possible for all the wannabe car designers in the world – many of whom, perhaps, don’t have a job because of the flailing auto industry – help resurrect, well, the flailing auto industry?

That’s part of what Jay Rogers, co-founder of Boston start-up Local Motors is hoping. Using a form of distributed innovation approach – crowdsourcing as happens at businesses like Innocentive – Rogers has set up a Web site to attract a vast online community, which now comprises of 2000 ambitious, creative designers from 121 countries. The first car design happened in less than 3 months, a task that typically takes Detroit 2 years.

This is not surprising considering the crowd at Innocentive solves complex R&D problems at a rate 30% better than that accomplished by in-house approaches at scientific companies.

Local Motors' plan is also to tap into consumers’ own interests – it would be sort of like customers giving ideas for a personalized car. Online design competitions help fuel this project. In the true crowdsourcing model of Threadless, the t-shirt designing company, users vote on the best designs submitted by hobbyists, amateurs and experts alike. The winners are motivated by huge cash prizes in the range of a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars.

“I realized that the car industry needed to create totally new designs and do it a more honest way, where we learn from the community out there: what do you want to buy?”

James Surowiecki’s wisdom of the crowds, of course, thrives on the idea that a divergent crowd is required for a collective brain to be smart and innovative. Harvard researcher Karim Lakhani (who serves as an adviser for Local Motors) has shown that Innocentive’s success rests on ideas and solutions coming from people outside the immediate field of expertise.

As crowdosurcing guru Jeff Howe once told me, the problem is that people in a given field often operate within their own psilos; those who are not restrained by that can think outside the box. So it's not surprising that Rogers believes the crowd will help solve problems inherent in the auto industry – from the restraint to explore modern technology to the insistence on using expensive material to build cars.

His company, which is now in the idea stage, will take the most promising propositions from the Web site to various factories that Rogers plans to set up all around the US. To add to the personalized car concept, the first set of vehicles produced by Local Motors – whose design and engineering is now being crowdsourced – will actually allow customers to be part of production as well – buyers will be invited to come and help put their cars together themselves.

It works for t-shirts, it works for complex scientific problems. Perhaps, it will work for cars as well.

The Guardian of Crowdsourcing

The Guardian continues to amaze with its dedication to participatory journalism and crowdsourcing.

Its latest is a tool to track the expenses of its members of parliament, following the MP expenses scandal. A few days after its main competitor) breaks the string of stories resulting in skyrocketing circulations, the Guardian decides to compete with what it does best.

Certainly not the most mind-boggling experiment in crowdsourcing ever undertaken, but the idea is phenomenal in its simplicity. All the Guardian has really done with this project is rent server space and put up a whole list of public records on its Web site. It has created an easy interface for people to provide the information it needs and left the rest to its audience.

Nieman Lab picks out the best aspects of the project – everything from the simple interface, the progress bar that assesses progress, the contributor ratings, and the mugshots of the smiling MPs (I’m not kidding!) has contributed toward increasing participation. It's all about making it more user-friendly and engaging.

The response has been huge with 20,000 people participating in the effort and 160,000 pages analyzed. While the early stages of the project are more about making deductions and pointing out anything that may be suspicious or erroneous, as my co-blogger at the Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw points out, the fun part will be the overlays and mashups that emerge from the data, which will be the actual stories.

Of course, it helps to have the sort of involved readership that the Guardian has. Newspapers have tried similar databases before. A couple years ago, the Washington Examiner started WECAN, a huge database of public records with a similar idea, and the Gannett’s Democrat and Chronicle posted a similar list of government documents on its site, both with little or no participation from the audience. It didn’t help that the sites’ editors didn’t follow up or pursue the project to any great magnitude.

However, what really, really helps such projects catch fire is an inflammatory story of epic proportions - that's the sort of thing that stimulates a great deal of interest. Simon Willison, the project’s programmer, reinforces this by stating how important it was to kick this off on Thursday when the story was all over the airwaves, as opposed to Friday as it was initially planned.

In the past, Talking Point Memo has perhaps had the most success in crowdsourcing this sort of story when it released Department of Justice documents following the Bush Administration’s US attorney firings scandal. Skilled blogger though Josh Marshall is, what really piqued reader interest was the huge controversy behind it.

The Guardian has already proved the high level of enthusiasm of its audience with its Katine project where its Web site managed to attract readers who offered to donate not just ideas and information, but also resources such as books and bicycles to Ugandan children, services in the form of medical help from doctors, and infrastructure for the implementation of solar power – all this quite literally originated in the comments threads of the Katine blog.

Most of this initially happened with the weight of the Guardian organization, no doubt, but the paper has to be lauded for its continued interest and effort in the area. It has a surprisingly long history of such exercises, dating back to the early 2000s.

Well before the existence of social media tools, it started an investigative report on bribery charges against a Saudi Arabian arms company with the help of amateurs to help professional journalists through its Web site.

News organizations should really be doing a lot more to seize on such opportunities. The audience won't contribute its valuable time and effort for just about anything, but occasionally a story comes along, which begs to be crowdsourced.