Unpaid Labour

Also known as "Crowd Sourcing," "Asking the Audience," or most commonly "Harness Collective Intelligence." This is a Web 2.0 pattern that can be utilised by practically anything which allows user interaction. 

But what precisely is it? Well a collective Intelligence is just what it sounds like: an accumulated amount of intelligent beings. The more beings there are, the higher chances there's a wider range of skills and perspectives mixed within the community. This wider range of abilities enables the community to contribute with skills the business may not even expect! Because of these combined perks, the collective group can quickly and easily correct and confirm each others' calculations and motivations.

Businesses often have a main goal and work together in that regard,
but individuals in a community often have their own goals.

So how does one "harness" that? Sometimes it's not enough to simply allow the users to interact with the software. Attractive motivations for a user can include being able to leave their mark, to influence other users or even simply making the service more convenient for themselves. Their actions can directly or indirectly assist the business. Direct actions can be from contributing meaningful reviews and content whilst indirect assistance comes from browsing and consuming products.

The question then is: What interactions should be enabled to the users? A tried and true method as Glenn points out from Joshua Porta's work, would be to narrow them down to three steps:

1. Initial Action - Enable users to submit reviews or their own content.
2. Display - Present the content to other users, especially the recommended content.
3. Feedback - Enable users to interact with the content.

To explain how this works, I've decided to examine how one website fulfills this criteria.

Whirled, a flash-based virtual environment, is about creativity. While Three Rings created a large amount of the initial content, their focus was to allow users upload their own. This lead to users creating their own homes, characters to represent themselves and even more games to play. While most of the content is through Macromedia Flash, users may still upload images and audio. Because there was little restriction on what was allowed, the amount of user-generated content is staggering.

Just one of the many popular avatars on Whirled

Users can choose to "sell" their content, allowing others to purchase copies using the site's own currency: "Coins" (rewarded for playing games and interacting with others) and "Golden Bars" (earned only through purchases or creating highly regarded games for the community). With each product in the store, users can not only try the item out, but also rate, tag, comment, favourite and even share it with friends. The collective community community drives everything on the website, encouraging and rewarding new and interesting content. The community even helps maintain Whirled's own wiki, which promotes tutorials on creation as well as information on current games.

Checking back, did Whirled complete these three criteria?

1. Initial Action - Users can upload a wide variety of content.
   
2. Display - Users can use their items in public, and choose to host their items in the virtual store.
   
3. Feedback - Users have a variety of actions (besides purchasing) to items in the store.

The sad truth of HCI is that it essentially follows Metcalfe's Law (which can be crudely summed up as: The value of the service is proportional to the number of people who are using it). If Whirled's community dwindles, top contributors grow idle or even leave, the appeal of the whole website seems to follow suit. This in turn could cause even more members of the community to leave. In a nightmare scenario, this would continue to until there wasn't a community anymore. 

References:
Glenn (2009) Defining Requirements for Social Web Applications. Retrieved March 9, 2012
Three Rings, Guide for Whirled Parents, Retrieved March 10, 2012
Three Rings, Whirled Website