Tear down this wall! Crowdsourcing comes of age

Hello. I’m Sara and I joined Made by Many last month. My forte is content, so it seems appropriate that my first post should be all about conversation… specifically the two conversations that go with just about every digital project.

Never simple, is it?

The first of these is all about the customers, the people for whom we’re building this product or service. This conversation is pretty user-centric: essentially, what do they need? What are their problems, and how can we help solve — or at least minimise — them?

Then there’s a second conversation — the behind-the-scenes, creative-type stuff about how things actually work. What functionality do we offer? Do our user stories tell the whole story, and does it have a happy ending? What about typeface and layout? And finally, how the hell do we iterate this beast?

A real-life example, if you please

At Made by Many we’re creating a service to help small and medium-sized UK tech companies compete in international markets.

We’ve created a LinkedIn group and we’re using it to talk to users about their experiences, their needs, and what they want from the service. This is going really well — we’re getting some very frank feedback and learning some immensely useful things.

And we’re not alone in this practice. As crowdsourcing becomes more commonplace, and as the common sense of early and frequent user testing trickles through the industry, this first user-focused conversation has become more public. Indeed, our group is open — you’re welcome to join in and take a look round.

More and more, those who create things are seeking out input from the people who will eventually use those things. I think this is exceptional.

The thing is, that’s only half of it

But that second conversation, the one about how we create things and how they look and work?

By and large, most of us are still having that conversation behind a wall, and the only people allowed behind that wall are those of us who are working on the project.

We come up with all sorts of great ideas, but we keep them all to ourselves until the great ta-da moment… by which time the work is done and it’s too late for new ideas as it’s too late to change anything. (Even in agile, folks, even in agile.)

So what’s with the secrecy? Are the digital ninjas worried someone’s going to copy their moves? Please. Yet I don’t think it’s ego, either, that’s got us walling off our creative conversations.

I think it’s a case of paradigm, that we do things this way because that’s the way we’ve always done them. Sure, it can be an unwieldy job, wrangling all sorts of feedback into place, but on the whole, peer-to-peer advice, especially when it’s from people whose skills you respect, is invaluable.

So now comes the part where we put our money where our (or in this case, my very big) mouth is…

For our project, just as we’re nurturing user-centric discussions on LinkedIn, we’re also engaging in service-focused discussions on a new blog called Going Global.

Like some kind of marauding media horde, we’ve torn down the wall, marched in, set up a blog and started tweeting (GoingGlobalBeta). We’re doing all of this with the aim of sharing the processes we’re going through as we vision and build this service.

A new creative frontier?

As we proceed, discussion on the blog should evolve from vision and proposition stuff to the detail of the piece: layout, language, user experience, infrastructure and design. We’re going to share all of it on Going Global, because we want our peers to share their opinions and ideas with us.

At its best, crowdsourcing is about opening up the conversation — bringing people and developing more intelligent work in more intelligent ways. This is a good way to work.

So here we go, throwing back the curtain, tearing down the wall…

Let there be light.

Or at the very least, constructive criticism.