Panel Notes from FoE 5: Crowdsourcing for Producing Media Content

The following are some notable comments from a panel at this week’s Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT.

Panel: “Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content”

  • In the pre-production phase, to start a crowd going, you should have fans help you create simple and small ideas. The simple interactions will slowly draw people into the idea. Once they start participating more, then you can move to give them harder tasks — the hardest task/request being funding.
  • Having a community financially invested in a film not only produces funds, but can leverage the community’s time and energy after the film has been released to promote.
  • One of the keys to successful crowdsourced projects is making sure that if you fail, you need to be able to fail fast.
  • When it comes to crowdsourcing, you must find the balance between what you’re asking your crowd to do and what you’re giving them.
  • The success of crowdsourcing demands transparency. There should be a mechanism to let the crowd know how their input has been used. The sense of participation feeds the crowd to continue to participate.
  • Must provide a simple platform for crowds to engage and use.
  • In crowdsourcing there needs to be a person that ultimately decides what goes in to the content. Crowdsourcing isn’t necessarily a democracy, there needs to be a benevolent dictator/editor.
  • Crowdsourcing may become a fad if there are too many projects that are too broad. The more Kickstarter projects there are, for example, the harder it is to support them all. People will ultimately select projects that they are intensely interested in.
  • Who’s the crowd? When the term “crowd” is used, it’s really just an excuse because you don’t know the audience/group’s identity.
  • Right now a vast majority of projects that use the crowd, use it to build funds, or gather ideas. There are very few examples of crowds changing media from the creative aspect.

Speakers:
Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil)
Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland)
Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)

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