Further examples of Collaborative Creation
The following is a list of links to projects and initiatives we have been keeping an eye on or found interesting over the past year or so. Some are well known, others less so. Many in this list are non-corporate initiatives and hence blur strict co-creation definition boundaries. I have roughly categorised them for your viewing pleasure but am very happy to be challenged on this and indeed their validity in being part of a blog on co-creation.
Creating Engagement
Projects and initiatives with the intent of involving others to create engagement.
http://www.doritos.co.uk/
‘You make it, we play it’
A open competition to consumers to create a 29 second TV advertisement.
http://www.prescribethenation.com/
Vaseline chose an active member of a small town community to test their product and watched how recommendations spread. From her initial recommendation of the lotion to friends and family, soon almost 1000 people in her town were switched on to the brand and its benefits.
www.wethinkthebook.net/
A book written by Charles Leadbeater about how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information. Leadbeater release parts of his book onto the internet and followed the reaction, then edited it back into his book.
http://factory.lego.com/
An online tool that allows users to design and build their own Lego sets.
http://www.walkers.co.uk/flavours/
‘Do Us a Flavour’
An open competition to design a new crisp flavour for Walkers. The best flavours are then voted on by the public.
http://www.islandreefjob.com
An open call for job applicants by Tourism Queensland asking people to submit video applications for a year long employment opportunity to live on an island and blog about it.
http://www.toyota.com/hybrid/
Toyota has relaunched its Web site at Toyota.com/hybrids to allow hybrid owners to post videos, share photos and meet other owners. It’s also challenged owners to discuss their reasons for buying a hybrid vehicle. The site has already registered nearly 10,000 users.
http://www.skittles.com/chatter.htm
Skittles uses twitter to share consumers’ thoughts on their product?
http://www.uniqlo.com/try/
Yugo Nakamura and Simone Inc have created a site that presents Uniqlo’s research behind its latest range of bras. Hundreds of little video voxpops are arranged in 3D patterns to visualize the women’s responses to a series of questions.
http://ilovebees.com/
I Love Bees was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie’s 2004 video game Halo 2. Players solved puzzles, audio logs that were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story and got people talking about the Halo universe.
Beastie Boys music video: Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That! It was created by giving camcorders to 50 audience members of a concert at Madison Square Garden. The audience members were instructed to keep the cameras rolling at all times. The footage was edited together for their music video.
Engaging in Creation
Projects and initiatives that enable people to engage in the creation
http://www.buglabs.net/
BUG is a modular, open source system for building devices.
http://www.openmoko.com/
Project aiming to create a customizable, open source smartphone platform based on GNU/Linux. Software and hardware files can be download and custmiszed for individual needs.
http://reprap.org
The RepRap Project is an initiative aimed at creating a largely self-replicating machine which can be used for rapid prototyping and manufacturing. Authors envision the possibility to cheaply distribute RepRap units to people and communities, enabling them to create (or download from the internet) complex products and artifacts without the need for expensive industrial infrastructure.
http://code.google.com/android/
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications to run on Android-powered devices.
http://www.littlebigplanet.com/
LittleBIGPlanet is a unique PS3 game combining platform adventure with a huge community enabling gamers to play, create & share their experiences.
Facilitating Co-creation
Platforms or initiatives designed to facilitate a collaborative approach
http://www.ebbsfleetunited.co.uk/
The football club was to be taken over by internet venture MyFootballClub.co.uk, a revolutionary idea involving paid members owning the club, voting on decisions and picking the team.
http://www.mysociety.org/
Builds websites which benefit the civic and community aspects of people’s lives
http://www.groupsnearyou.com/
With the help of users, ‘Groups Near You’ maps all neighbourhood email lists, forums and community blogs so that people can search activity in their area.
http://www.fixmystreet.com/
A site to report graffiti, potholes, broken lighting etc. Each report gets sent directly to the council who then notifies the site when they are fixed. There is now a new iPhone app, allowing people to report on the go.
http://www.pledgebank.com/
The purpose of PledgeBank is to get people past a barrier which strikes down endless good plans before they can are carried out – the fear of acting alone. It allows anyone to say “I’ll do X if other people also do X”,
http://www.theextraordinaries.org/
The Extraordinaries delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.
http://developer.yahoo.net/hackday/
Open Hack Days are events hosted by Yahoo! in which participants are encouraged to create web applications in 24 hours ideally using one or more of Yahoo’s APIs or open source libraries.
http://barcamp.org/
BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.
http://www.sicamp.org/
Social Innovation Camp is an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age.
http://www.netsquared.org/
NetSquared enables social benefit organisations to leverage the tools of the social web.
http://www.freecycle.org/
The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,708 groups with 6,537,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns.
http://betalabs.nokia.com
Nokia shares new ideas and technologies with the public and has foroums to allow users the discuss what they have seen.
http://www.kluster.com/
Kluster™ is a collaborative decision making platform turns questions into answers, ideas into opportunities, and analysis into action. Their approach is based on real-world group decision-making models, taking into account individual influence and participation.
http://www.ushahidi.com/
An open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile.
http://uk.zopa.com
Zopa is a lending and borrowing exchange where real people sidestep the banks to get a better deal.2.3 Individual and Collective
Co-creating – Crowd Sourcing
Initiatives that ride the line between co-creation and crowd sourcing.
http://www.tomtom.com/page/mapshare
TomTom’s Map Share technology enhances your navigation experience, letting you make instant corrections to your map directly on your TomTom device. You can also receive similar corrections made by the entire TomTom community of Map Share users.
http://www.gwap.com
A set of games that train computers to “solve problems for humans all over the world”, by understanding users perceptions of tags.
http://www.superstructgame.org
Superstruct is a massively multi-player forecasting game. By playing the game, players help chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how problems we may face will be solved.
http://www.birdpost.com/
A citizen science website to post sightings of birds, along with mapping and rare bird alerts.
http://fold.it
A citizen science game that enables the public to contribute to important scientific research by testing proteins and how they fold.
https://www.galaxyzoo.org/
The Galaxy Zoo files contain images of almost a quarter of a million galaxies. In order to understand how these galaxies formed, they use the public to help to classify them according to their shapes.
http://recaptcha.net/
A captcha system that uses successful decoding to helps digitise books for online use.
http://www.crowdspirit.com
The CrowdSpirit platform proposes a new model based on crowd sourcing that enables businesses to involve innovators from outside the company directly in the design of innovative products and services.
https://www.mturk.com
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.
http://www.ageofstupid.net/
Crowd_funded film about climate change. Street interventions borrowing the language of protest campaigns to spread the word of the film release.
http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/
Over 2000 human voices recorded over the internet then used to sing the song Daisy Bell
Miscellaneous
http://plateastweets.blogspot.com/
@Platea is a street art collective of artists and non-artists who share an interest in the power of public art carried out in the digital megacity of social media.
http://www.ponoko.com/
You can design a product and get it made in your own personal factory. You can also edit and mashup the product plans you download from Ponoko to create something completely original.
http://www.pachube.com/
Pachube is a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.
http://www.showstudio.com/
Website designed for people to see behind the scenes of how fashion designers design things.
https://www.tchibo-ideas.de/
The best ideas win: open innovation platform for people to suggest new ideas for Tchibo to sell.
http://berlin.unlike.net/
Mobile travel guide open for people to contribute to and create their own travel itinerary
http://www.slicethepie.com/
Slicethepie is a financing platform for the music industry that enables new and established Artists to raise money directly from Music Fans and Investors.
http://lexposure.net/
L’Exposure is a networking and information portal custom-built for people in the fashion and creative scene that enables brands to have direct communication with their customers and admirers.

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