Springtime for the Hive Mind

3 Questions to Epi Ludvik Nikaj, founder of Crowdsourcing Week-conference

The first promise of the internet was democratisation – new voices would be heard and a plethora of expressions would flourish. Today, the internet looks more like monocultures inside walled gardens, managed by mammoth companies harvesting user data. Very far from the original idea. Can new methods in crowdsourcing and distributed technology bring back the first promise? Netopia talked to crowdsourcing evangelist Epi Ludvik Nikaj to get the latest.

What is new in crowdsourcing?

Without any doubt Crowdsourcing is going mainstream and today we see it being utilized across almost every industry and government sector. The power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) will help accelerate this process by enabling HI (Human Intelligence) as a collective super brain to solve the world’s biggest problems and challenges. Today we see much more sophisticated user cases of crowdsourcing from co-creation to prize challenges. We are at the cross roads of second wave of this digital transformation and the key enabler for every individual is empowerment through blockchain technology. Think about past 25 years of internet of information and next 25 years as internet of value. And this value internet is much more exciting and empowering than the past era of internet.

What is the role of venture capital?

VC’s as platforms. This is the future not just for VC’s but for companies including governments. We see more and more type of financing being syndicated through platforms such as www.angel.co and www.gust.com for VC’s. We see platforms like https://e-estonia.com. We see platforms like https://ideas.lego.com. What this tells us that software is eating the old world and with this we are going to see acceleration and efficiency.

If governments used to rule the world, and now it’s the tech giants of Silicon Valley who rule the digital world, who will rule in the future? 

The Crowd is the World’s Newest Super Power. These were the words of a good friend of mine Joe Schmidt of Freedom United at our last CSW Summit in DC. I let the time tell, but certainly we will have a very different governance because at the heart of economic governance we have a disruption taking place as we speak and this type of disruption is too BIG to ignore it. Crowd Currencies and Initial Coin Offerings [new crypto currencies introduced – editor’s note] are gaining momentum.

 

Read more:

http://crowdsourcingweek.com/14-parts-of-the-crowd-economy-landscape/