Should governments make use of the crowd?

21

October

2015

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Internet technology is an ideal choice to connect people and to bring people together for a common goal. In other words: to mobilize the crowd. The government could also benefit from the crowd, there is a lot to win on that field!

The Dutch government is already using the crowd, on a small scale. A good example is Amber Alert, this is an initiative which allows citizens to help tracing missing persons. The last few years have showed that this is a good initiative, because it works well.

The current technology allows us to provide a voluntary contribution to society, which is not very difficult to do. Namely, you can divide all of the tasks in to micro tasks. An example: Fixi. Fixi is a mobile app, which helps people to contribute to a good condition of the public space. Users can take a picture of a problem, such as a broken pit or a fallen tree, and send this picture to the app. This notification will immediately appear in the back office of the concerned town, so that they can solve this problem. The citizens can later on tell the other people on the app that the problem is indeed solved. I think this is a great example of how governments could benefit from the crowd, by mobilizing the people. Everyone can participate in its own way, by only looking at the problems other people send in or by sending their own problems. This means there is no pressure, but if you participate you get the feeling that you have been useful for your town. Furthermore, I think this fits the goals of a lot of governments. They want to fill the gap between government and citizens, and isn’t this the perfect way to do so?

Thousands of people that voluntary contribute to society will create a lot of benefits for the government, if they are able to use it well. With the current technologies it is possible!

I am curious about your opinions and if you could come up with more examples. Do you think there are more ways for the government to make clever use of the crowd? Or do you think this is not a good way to fill the gap between government and citizens?

For more information about Fixi, take a look at the video below. I’m sorry this is in Dutch, but only looking at it and not reading the attached text is enough to understand the idea of the app, I think!

Website Dutch Cowboys, ahttp://www.dutchcowboys.nl/online/tip-voor-de-overheid-gebruik-de-crowd, accessed at 21th Oktober 2015

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Smartwatches are taking over!

17

October

2015

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The first digital watches were introduced in the 1970ies and almost put conventional watches out of business back then. This eventually was postponed until the 1990ies. Samsung introduced its first smartwatch in 1999.

Today, Oktober 2015, Samsung has just introduced its Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch. This impressed a lot of technicians, because this was a big innovation in the field of smartwatches, especially for Samsung, who didn’t make very much impression in this area the last few years.

Nu.nl has got the chance to try the sports version of the new smartwatch from Samsung. It is not a nerdy gadget, because it isn’t that big and therefore doesn’t stand out. This ensures this new smartwatch from Samsung to be miles ahead of the old Samsung smartwatch, which was enormous, ugly and it barely functioned. The quality of the new watch is a lot better and the rubber band is comfortable.

The watch can be controlled by a circle around the screen. With every click, you switch apps or screens. This makes this watch directly understandable, in contrast to the Apple smartwatch which is pretty difficult to understand.

The most outstanding characteristic is actually invisible: in contrast to other, former Samsung smartwatches, this watch is also functioning in combination with Android-smartphones from other manufacturers. This makes this watch more attractive to other Android-users, who don’t use Samsung. I think this is a very smart move, which would definitely raise sales.

Watch the video below to get a better idea of how this smartwatch works.

After reading this information about the new Samsung watch, would you consider buying one? It is clear that the smartwatches nowadays are only getting better and that this is the smartphone of the future. Do you think that smartwatches really are going to replace smartphones eventually? I would like to hear your opinion about it!

Website Nutech, http://www.nu.nl/reviews/4119020/eerste-indruk-samsung-imponeert-met-gear-s2-smartwatch.html, accessed at 17th Oktober 2015
Website Nutech, http://www.nu.nl/gadgets/4146578/samsung-smartwatch-gear-s2-30-oktober-verkrijgbaar.html, accessed at 17th Oktober 2015

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Home assignment week 7: peer production and open source

16

October

2015

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This week’s subject for the home assignment for the minor Social Media and Social Networks is peer production and open source. Peer production relies mainly on self-organizing communities of individuals and is a way of producing goods and services. Open source is related to peer production. It also stands for a community of individuals, who are allowed act as users and developers at the same time.

The first article is written by Hyatt, J. (2008) and is an interview with MySQL chief Marten Mickos. According to Mickos, the four main reasons for programmers to contribute to MySQL in open source ways are to get the product they need, to build a reputation, to prove something to themselves and to get satisfaction from seeing their work have effect.

Hippel, von E. and Krogh, von G. wrote an article about open source software and the ‘’private-collective’’ innovation model: issues for organization science (2003). The private investment model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection, the collective action model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good.

The third article is about group size and incentives to contribute, based on a natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia, by Zhang, M. and Zhu. F (2011). The authors mention, that former literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size.

Each of the above mentioned articles focuses on one particular subject, involving open source software. I have become particularly interested in the ‘’puzzle’’ of why information providers are willing to perform a certain task for free. With help of my own research, I found that I can add up a learning part to the four main reasons mentioned in the first article. In the second article my finding was that because of working in a team, people become more motivated and they value their contribution to the team as very important.

I have chosen two cases that illustrate my subject of interest: how people are motivated to contribute on open source platforms, namely open source content management system Drupal and open source software Prestashop. These two are different, but they also make me understand why contributors would participate in a big community and solve problems for free.

  • G, Niedner, S. and Herrmann, S. (2003), ‘’Motivation of Software Developers in Open Source Projects: an Internet-based Survey of Contributors to the Linux Kernel’’, Institur fuer Psychologie, p. 1159-1177
  • Hippel, von E. and Krogh, von G. (2003), ‘’Open Source Software and the ‘’Private-Collective’’ Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science’’, Organization Science, 14(2) p. 209-223
  • Hyatt, J. (2008), ‘’The Oh-So-Practical Magic of Open-Source Innovation’’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(1) p. 15-19
  • Lakhani, K.R. and Hippel, von E. (2002), ‘’How Open Source Software Works: ‘’Free’’ User-to-User Assistance’’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 923-943
  • Zhang, M. and Zhu, F. (2011), ‘’Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia’’, American Economic Review, 101(4) p. 1601-1615
  • Websites, accessed 15th of Oktober at https://www.drupal.com/ and https://www.prestashop.com/

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Digital marketing trends 2015: did it come true?

15

September

2015

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Earlier this year, I ran into a blog post on a website. This post was all about online and digital marketing and what the trends for 2015 would be. Of course, a big advantage of digital advertising is the possibility to share on social media platforms, which increases attention. It is thus very important for contemporary companies to follow these trends, so that they are not competed out of the market by competitors who do use these new techniques. I would like to discuss this article and kindly ask you, my readers, did these trends come true this year? Or do you think these trends are going to be more important next year?

Hereby, a selection of the most important advertising trends and some interesting examples.

1. Transparency
Companies have to give their customers a ‘realtime peek’ into their businesses, to give people a relevant experience. A great example of transparency is a ‘’behind the scenes’’ movie, hereby an example of a Vistaprint movie.

2. Realtime marketing becomes local
Because of social media, consumers are more volatile than ever. For companies, it is important to be able to make use of certain events right away, instead of planning marketing actions months before. More and more tools make realtime marketing possible, such as this cool asset sharing tool:

3. Human advertising
Review marketing becomes human advertising, consumers determine the message of a company. Instead of collecting reviews, companies are given the ability to respond directly to customer recommendations. Companies can reach their public any time, based on the newest review posts. See this video of Rivvur:

4. E-mail marketing
A lot of consumers would definitely say that e-mail marketing is not a good way of advertising, because they find this really annoying. Marketers believe otherwise, because the one-on-one contact with consumers is valuable. With the help of new tools and smart customer data, customer behavior can be used to send targeted e-mails.

For me, transparent companies are very interesting. I like to see something from within the company and I’ve seen this a lot in 2015. I’m very interested in your opinions and maybe some additions. I haven’t mentioned all the trends, but I think the upper mentioned trends are the most important.

http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/de-10-trends-voor-online-en-digital-marketing-in-2015

http://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2014/11/09/11-marketing-trends-to-%20watch-for-in-2015/

http://www.saydaily.com/2014/11/trends-in-digital-media-2015

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