SXSW 2012 - Crowdsourcing: The Ensemble's Experience With the Netflix Prize

Crowdsourcing: The Ensemble's Experience With the Netflix Prize
Event	Interactive 2010
Format	Dual
Organizer	Greg McAlpin – The Ensemble Netflix Prize team
Description	Over 5,100 teams of scientists and engineers worked for almost three years to find a solution to the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize. How did the top two teams meet the challenge? Why did so many teams fail? A member of the leading team shares the inside story on crowdsourcing technical challenges.
Questions Answered	What is crowdsourcing? How does crowdsourcing technical grand challenge problems work? What do crowds need? What is the Netflix Prize and why was it hard? What motivated so many scientists, engineers, and mathematicians put so much effort into solving this problem? How is the Netflix Prize a good model for crowdsourcing scientific/technical grand challenge problems? What did the Netflix prize get right and what did Netflix prize get wrong? How were the successful team’s good models for large scale multinational collaboration? What can be learned from the teams that failed to meet the challenge? How can businesses use collaborative problem solving to find break-through solutions?
Level	Intermediate
Category	Case Study, Collaborative Filtering, Community / Online Community, International

Crowdsourcing: The Ensemble's Experience With the Netflix Prize