WisconsInnovation

An interesting example of artists utilizing a community to co-create art was recently featured in Esquire magazine. A project entitled "Ten Thousand Cents" paid 1 cent to 10,000 individuals, working in isolation, to draw a fraction of the overall project. However, the individuals did not know what the end project was supposed to be. The end result, as you can see, is a pretty good looking $100 bill!

Two key factors helped the project succeed. First, the 10,000 "artists" who worked on the project were sourced through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is based upon the idea that even in a world of incredible computing power, humans are still better at performing certain tasks. Examples include identifying pictures, transcribe audio recordings, or in this case, creating art. Mechanical Turk allows users to submit projects they need help with (the Requestors) and others to be compensated for completing the tasks (the Workers), in a model reminiscent of InnoCentive's brokering strategy.

The other crucial part of the project was that the 10,000 artists utilized a toolkit that provided online drawing capabilities (basic brushes, paint buckets, color swatches, etc.) to assist those lacking artistic abilities, enabling them to contribute. Overall, this project was a interesting look into the power of crowdsourcing, noting that some projects can be performed faster, cheaper, and more efficiently utilizing a large number of users working in isolation. Ten Thousand Cents really embodies an adage we all know: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."