"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.

Crowdsourcing Analyzed

Here's the Prezi presentation that I put together on Crowdsourcing and presented on 10/28/10. It doesn't include the information about prediction markets that I'd hoped, but it's a good start on the subject.

Crowdsourcing on Prezi

Digital Literacy Overview in Prezi Form

I'm glad to see many in our class playing with Prezi (as Andrew did recently). The visual nature of Prezi is far superior to PowerPoint. It is not tied down to sequence as PowerPoint is (one can pan around, zoom in and out, interrupt following a set path, etc.). It is more open to uses of space, movement, size, and orientation, too. For me, it isn't so much a presentation tool as it is a thinking tool. I reconceive of my topic while struggling to represent it using the formal features that Prezi favors.

Here's a first draft of a presentation about digital literacy that I put into Prezi form (for a presentation I'm giving to some English majors this week). What do you think? Part of what helped me here was recasting each of the three C's (consume-create-connect) into a set of questions. The visuals set up some parallelisms and symbolic relationships that I liked. I'm interested in your feedback before I take it further. Oh, and I've also set it up as public and licensed for re-use. Take a copy of it and revise, remix, or rework it on your own, if you like.

Digital Literacy on Prezi