Contact Becke for more information:

Download press release

MINDSHARING: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything

What if we could make every important decision with the help of the smartest people in the world?

Published by Portoflio Books, Penguin in Hardback / Paperback (£12.99 / 19.99) on 21-05-2015

‘Today, social networks are mostly about sharing moments. In the next decade, they’ll also help you answer questions and solve complex problems.’

Mark Zuckerberg, 2014

~

We all struggle to make the best decisions possible. But what if we could make every important decision with the help of the smartest people in the world? Sound impossible? Surprisingly, we can all access the collective wisdom of hundreds or even thousands of people who together are as smart as any expert.

With millions of adults using Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, more and more of us are turning to crowdsourcing to find information about finance, relationships, careers, and much more. In MINDSHARING: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything former Microsoft vice president of marketing Lior Zoref shows a form of crowdsourcing that doesn’t ask people to think for us but instead to think with us. Going beyond our small circle of connections for advice and support, Mindsharing allows us to harness the much greater power of our “weak” connections.

Drawing on his experience at Microsoft, as well as insights from his own research and mindsharing experiments, Zoref details step-by-step guidelines for tapping into the full potential of online networks. He also provides fascinating examples such as:

* How an obese man with the goal of losing one hundred pounds in a year conquered his fitness goals with an army of unwavering supporters.

* How Zoref, at his own TED Talk, was able to spontaneously poll the audience and get a near-exact estimate of the weight of an ox he brought onstage.

* How a distraught mother with a desperately ill four-year-old used Facebook to crowdsource the diagnosis that saved her son’s life, after doctors couldn’t help him.

Mindsharing is being applied to decisions as minor as how to design a business card and as major as buying a house. Whether you need to make better financial choices, find the love of your life, or transform your career, Zoref will show you how to harness the collective intelligence of a broad and diverse crowd.

~

Lior Zoref is a crowd wisdom researcher, an international speaker, and a consultant. He worked for fourteen years at Microsoft, most recently as vice president of marketing for consumer and online services.

MINDSHARING: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything's related campaigns

See more campaigns →

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics and in love, we find ways around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in which we don’t have to look, listen or reveal ourselves.

We are becoming addicted to connection over conversation, and this fact is stopping us from engaging in real debate, sharing our real opinions and reacting to our family, friends, partners and colleagues in a way that either encourages necessary conflict, or diffuses it. We are shying away from the real politics of the public square and heading for a subdued, online version of ourselves.

Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools and the workplace, Turkle argues in RECLAIMING CONVERSATION that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim conversation. The most human – and humanising – thing that we do.

Read more →