Crowdsourcing Your Wishes

by on 26 January, 2007 - 10:44

by: Karl Long

The simplest way to describe the Robin Hood Fund is it’s kind of like Digg for wishes. You post a wish, and estimate how much it would cost to fulfill your wish, post it, and let the community vote on it and even contribute money toward the wish fund.

At the end of the month the votes are tallied, the money collected and the top wishes are granted. There are two kinds of wishes, nice wishes and naughty wishes, nice ones are the “save the orphanage”, or I need $150 for the electric bill, and naughty are “I want a porsche” type, and the Robin Hood Fund caters to both.

Skeptical? Well this guy got $10,000 for video equipment based on this video wish, which is hysterical (in a very twisted dry kind of way).

link for feedreaders

Interestingly this idea is actually a product of a “crowdsourcing” company called Cambrian House (who I wrote about previously in “crowdsourcing and the wisdom of bloggers”), which collects business ideas and lets the community vote on which ones to create, and help build it. I think this could be one of Cambrian House’s first real blockbuster idea that got to market, giving the whole crowdsourcing idea a great deal of creedence.

My question is why don’t enormous companies do this internally? Wouldn’t a great product be an enterprise crowdsourcing app that continually captured ideas and let folks vote on what we should be building and how they want to contribute?

Original Post: http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/crowdsourcing-your-wishes