Funding from Google drives crowdsource research
The Google Research Awards, which identifies and supports a multitude of faculty-presented research projects, recently awarded another 112 awards in 20 different verticals for more than $6 million dollars. One of the recipients of funding from this award is a crowdsourcing project by Matthew Salganik that we’ve been following (and using) called All Our Ideas.
All Our Ideas is a research project by a team from the Department of Sociology at Princeton University led by Salganik, Assistant Professor of Sociology. Their focus is to develop a place in which social data is collected through crowdsourced ideas and combined with the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods.
This is accomplished by creating “focus groups” that collect and prioritize ideas in a very open environment. The groups then create websites there they share ideas, vote on them, and continuously upload new ones.
While All Our Ideas is still in development, it has achieved significant success since its start last February. Some of their largest idea groups include: The Washington Post, Catholic Relief Services, Humanity in Action, The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning, and the Craigslist Foundation.
All Our Ideas has generated 600 “idea marketplaces” since February, 2010. The marketplaces have subsequently collected 400,000 votes and 20,000 new ideas.
Salganik is very proud of their accomplishments so far, and is particularly thrilled with Google’s recognition of their progress.
I am very happy about this generous grant. I expect a lot of exciting developments in 2011.
-Matthew Salganik
According to Google, some of the areas that received the highest level of funding included systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, security, and multimedia as well as international research. They reported that 29% of the funding went to International universities. Google is also accepting applications for the first round of 2011 awards from faculty members no later than February 1, 2011.
Salganik’s main areas of research is how one can use the web and other new technologies to change the way social science is done. All Our Ideas is part of that larger effort. Previous funding for this project has come from Google and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Two students worked on the project this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code.
The entire project is open-source and contains an API to build similar information aggregation sites with. Track their progress by following their blog, or connect with All Our Ideas on Twitter and Facebook.