Crowdsourcing: Time, Momentum and The 1% Rule

Health industry leader Fard Johnmar published a post about crowdsourcing today that features OrganizedWisdom on HealthCareVOX.

As his article correctly points out "crowdsourcing", a term first coined by Wired Magazine, has been going on for a long time in healthcare.  Fard mentions examples of people using blogs, bulletin boards and wikis to share health information.

Consistent with the recent review of OrganizedWisdom on Mashable.com, Fard points out "[OrganizedWisdom] will become most useful when there is more user-generated content available."

The beginning growth stages of any new online community can be daunting.  That's because crowdsourcing takes time. It takes time, support, and inertia to build momentum. And of course, there are never any guarantees a community will thrive.

So that brings us to one of our big challenges as we build OrganizedWisdom and help create a thriving health community: how do we get more and more people to begin to share their health wisdom? How do we get people who have so much wisdom to share, to unleash their life experience, advice and knowledge to help other people?

We know most Internet users have searched for health information (80%), but only a small percentage have yet joined this crowdsourcing movement to give back to the community by contributing themselves.  In fact, this phenomenon is actually the norm for most social networks. According to Jakob Neilsen's article on Participation Inequality, most people just look (90%), some participate and take some action like voting, linking, etc. (9%), and the small minority actually join the discussion and contribute content (1%).  Amazingly, these trends remain true for sites as comprehensive and full of activity and content as Wikipedia, Digg, and YouTube.

As we grow our community, finding the 1% who are willing and dedicated to sharing their most important health wisdom to share other people, remains one of our main areas of focus everyday.  For example, we are reaching out to health associations who are trying to educate others about important health topics like breast cancer, Lyme disease, and immune deficiency disease.  We are reaching out to health groups so they can tell their members to spread their wisdom as far and wide as possible by publishing WisdomCards, and we are contacting as many individual bloggers as possible.

Since this is just the beginning of this movement to get people to share their health wisdom, we need everyone's help and support.  Everyone knows someone who has important health wisdom to share. Take five minutes with someone you know who has experience of value to share and help them publish their story on OrganizedWisdom.  With each new WisdomCard published, this community becomes stronger, more helpful, and more valuable to everyone.

See for yourself what we mean.  All you have to do is read some of these helpful and inspiring examples of recently published WisdomCards on OrganizedWisdom.com to see how much value sharing can bring:

Shared WisdomCard on - Hodgkin's Lymphoma Disease
Shared WisdomCard on - Epilepsy
Shared WisdomCard on - Alzheimer's Disease
Shared WisdomCard on - Bipolar Manic Depression
Shared WisdomCard on - Lyme Disease
Others...here

This is a long journey and together we will build something truly amazing that will help a lot of people. And as we embark on this challenge to help more people share their experience, there is a great story from one of the co-founders of YouTube in today's New York Times.  In a video shot in April 2005, co-founder Steven Chen talks about “getting pretty depressed” because there were only 50 or 60 videos on the YouTube site at the time.  Only 17 months later, and there are tens of millions of videos...

Have you joined that 1% yet? Start by sharing your health wisdom here.