Crowdsourcing the Creation of Content
CBC Radio 3 hosted a session at Northern Voice called “Wikifying the CBC: Social Software at CBC Radio 3”. The session took a look at the new Canadian Music Wiki which is expected to launch this Friday. The wiki allows the Canadian public to contribute to an online music database of information about Canadian music. The project is best defined as a user-generated, participatory online resource on Canadian music.
People tend to be very enthusiastic about the subject of music. CBC Radio 3 is fortunate as they have a substantial base of online users currently using their web properties. The wiki is meant to harness their knowledge and enthusiasm. This provides an established base which will allow their project to succeed. There were some key takeaways from the session that you may want to consider if you are an organization considering accepting online contributions from the public – whether it be comments, forums, or wikis.
Key Takeaways
- How can you introduce radically different technologies within an organization? Within your organization, you need to innovate at the edges, where there is less impact on your organization if things go wrong. As an organizational entity, CBC Radio 3 exists at the margins of the CBC as a whole. It is often referred to as the ‘Area 51’ of the CBC as it tries out new technologies and tries to reach new audiences. It is a place where it is okay to fail. The project was also developed in Vancouver, out of the way of the main Toronto headquarters of CBC – so physically on the fringes on the organization as well.
- Minimize editorial risks in order to reduce liability.
- The key benefit to crowdsourcing the creation of content is to minimize financial costs. With 700 people cut from the CBC last year and continual budget cuts, the only way for CBC Radio 3 to generate a mass of new content is to involve the public.
Lessons Learned: Creating Content
- Balance openness with editorial checks.
- Get a mass of contributors.
- Use an existing base of power users.
Lessons Learned: Corporate Culture
- Can your culture support the idea? Some organizations would not be willing to open up and host content that hasn’t gone through stringent guidelines or review. This type of approach to content generation would not work in a heavily top-down organization.
As a news organization, the CBC has learned that the softer the area of news, the more open the site can be. This is where the community can police itself. Once you move to hard news, where politics and other controversial issues come into play, openness to audience contributions is much harder to accomplish. There are some cases where the CBC will publish stories and keep the comments turned off as they know the quality of discussion will deteriorate – there are some topics that will be better for public contributions than others. As controversy increases, so does your organization’s liability and risk.