Crowdsourcing, video games and open innovation make boring job fun!
Crowdsourcing is something I believe businesses need to weave into their social media strategy, and here’s a great example of how it can work. The National Library of Finland has put together an effort to digitize all of its archives—no easy task—by using crowdsourcing and videogames!
The project is called, Digitalkoot, which when translated means Digital Volunteers. Now normally digitizing archives is a dull, tedious job as you could imagine. With millions of pages of historical and cultural magazines, newspapers and journals, it would be easy for mistakes to hamper this process.
So the library partnered with Microtask, a company that designed two video games to make this work more entertaining. ‘
Here’s one of them, called “Mole Hunt.”
Mole Hunt actually shows players how to spot erroneous words in archived material. Not only that, but the game helps make sure digitized materials are accurate and searchable. The hope is that teachers and children will find the volunteer project appealing enough to sign up.