"Member Sourcing": Mormon Crowdsourcing

I presented on Friday, November 12, 2010, at the Mormon Media Studies Symposium at BYU. This was a very energizing conference with many different kinds of people attending from the worlds of journalism, media production, academia, the Internet, and diverse constituencies within the church (public affairs people, archivists, audio-visual producers, etc.). There's obviously a lot going on in this space and that's why conferences like this are so important. It was good to see Kristina Cummins there, one of our classmates, who blogged about using Twitter during the conference.

My topic was looking at crowdsourcing from an LDS perspective. I really enjoyed creating this Prezi presentation in which I put "member sourcing" into context and looked at recent and prospective uses of this means of organizing labor through online tools. The biggest takeaway from my research: the LDS church is looking more to develop creative collaborative communities through crowdsourcing than they are simply trying to use a top-down task delegation approach. And I'm convinced they have incubated the tools to accomplish this more substantial kind of crowdsourcing. Especially within their online tech community, they've proven they can motivate and encourage individuals with a talent pool, matching projects to interests, recognizing contributors, and building community at the same time they are developing specific projects. Very good sign.

My Prezi presentation follows the break, followed by the audio recording of the presentation if you want to listen to that while going through it.

Member Sourcing (Mormon Crowdsourcing) on Prezi