Collaboration changes Everything!!

Photo Credit: http://www.allfacebook.com

You might have seen many of these (CAPTCHA), and found them extremely annoying and a complete waste of time, well they are not.

Luis von Ahn has found an intelligent way to digitize 2.5 million books a year using “CAPTCHA,” a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. He proves that social media is not only about conversations, it’s about collaboration, it’s about the community at work, and it's about how mass collaboration can change everything.

The video effectively narrates the power of human collaboration using the internet, in an interesting and humorous manner. Ahn is using the precious human time - while registering, downloading a software or making a payment on a website (using CAPTCHA) - to digitize books. His new project, DuoLingo, is even more fascinating. He is using avid foreign language learners to translate webpages while learning the new language for free; using the “learning by doing” method. A beginner gets very simple sentences along with what each word means. As learners translate them they get to see how other people translate it, so they start learning the language, and as they get more and more advanced they get more complex sentences. Using this method, people do learn a language, as they are learning with real content. With DuoLingo, Ahn and his team propose a “Fair Business Model for Language Education” that doesn’t discriminate with the poor. Ahn’s examples of digitizing books and translating web content links to what Li & Bernoff may have called “Groundswell at work.”

That’s not all, people are energizing and helping the groundswell by using and entering these CAPTCHAs, and they’re taking it a step further, they’re embracing the power of  CAPTCHA by creating powerful and creative CAPTCHArt (Internet memes). 

Photo Credit: www.tumblr.com

Photo Credit: www.img.memecenter.com

Photo Credit: www.captchart.com

Li & Bernoff in their book, "Groundswell" say that, “Embracing the groundswell is making customers an integral part of the way you innovate with both products and process improvements.” They narrate the example of how Rob, U.S. Marketing Director for the brand Colossus Unilever and and his partner Babs, Unilever's U.S. Media Director, "helped Unilever not only accept the internet as a marketing vehicle but to gradually give up some control of the brand, embracing the power of groundswell and energizing customers to make their contributions;" by welcoming a cultural change within the organization and providing the Dove's Evolution campaign the right platform. This is exactly what Ahn and his team puts into practice but with masses (not specifically a brand/company); by tapping a fraction of unproductive human time of masses on the web and using it for the benefit of the community at large. 

According to marketing expert Edward Boches, "No social project will be really successful over the long term unless there's some sort of social improvement motive built in, because of the intrinsic nature of social media."

Well, I didn’t know that an annoying activity like CAPTCHA can be so valuable. Please share examples of innovation, creativity and collaboration that you may have seen with the rise of social media.