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Ask HN: What do people think about the concept of 'crowd-creating?'

2 points by anujpasricha ↗ HN
Noting the growing activity in areas of crowdsourcing/crowdfunding, I have been toying with the idea of 'crowd-creating.' Is it practical to create a platform where individuals/makers/experts from all over the world can get together and collaborate on projects (software+hardware) without ever having to meet (or meet occasionally)? Would such a platform be conducive to building products? Is physical presence a must?

3 comments

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chipsy
Right now this kind of thing is generally a leadership-driven project. While it's easy to make a space if you have a venue, someone also has to stand up and say "This space is for this purpose and I am going to work on advertising it as that, and organizing it so that it gets people who are interested in this topic in the door and talking to each other and doing valuable things with their time."

And then the technical problem is reduced to how cheaply and effectively they can message people about group activities, with physical presence being expensive/effective and comment threads being cheap/ineffective, and other tools like email, TV advertisement, etc. going somewhere in between. It takes a LOT of time and energy when you're going all-out to build up contact lists and follower counts and push messages out to them and make arrangements and do deals. This is how we now do present-day entrepreneurship; there are companies that go without physical presence, but we like having it around.

If you can solve this in a way that makes it an order of magnitude easier to organize activity, it would be a huge breakthrough for society, because it's the cost of communicating these basic "allocation problems" that ultimately drives the economy into monetized territory.

vishalchandra
Yes, already happening ~ Open source projects / products on www.github.com

But driven by the right leadership for each project.

If the collaboration tools are attractive (significantly more usable than currently available alternate offerings) enough for the leaders, rest will follow through.

Beehivefund
I think 'crowd-sourcing' carries over well enough across the niche you're exploring conceptualizing. Your thread caught my eye though because my colleagues and I are trying to build momentum behind 'Humanitarian Crowdfunding' and folks are mulling it over too. To a degree, it can't hurt to try building something around your term or else around a platform name and pitch using 'sourcing' but emphasizing your sub-niche. Just a thought...