Like the Aussies, you’d probably jump at the chance to preserve your country’s past – especially if you could fit your volunteer work into convenient breaks in your day.  That’s why it’s worth your while to learn about the crowdsourced Trove project.

But another reason is that you might be able to adapt the Trove approach to involve like-minded people in tackling a time-consuming yet worthy project that matters to you.

Here’s the story of The Trove.

The National Library of Australia invited citizens to join them an ambitious campaign to digitize out-of-copyright Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1954 that soon grew to include other Australian collections.

In Addition to a Catchy Title Give Your Project an Inspiring Label

The librarians described the project a “national online discovery service”, thus evoking national pride and a vivid reason to volunteer. And Debbie Campbell, the projects director of collaborative services, enthusiastically dubs her slideshare on the project “Explore Like Never Before ….”

Scale Your Project to Serve More People More Ways

Rose Holley, the librarian in charge of the Trove has been astounded by the wave of volunteer involvement. What began as a huge volunteer project has morphed into a search engine that now provides access to more than 90 million items about Australians and Australia. As of last month 4.3 million images from Picture Australia including all contributions from Flickr users can now be found in the new Trove service. Trove searches multiple types of resource, including photographs in Picture Australia and elsewhere.

From the beginning, the library wanted the results to be easily available and searchable by anyone. That’s why it opted for an open source platform that enables people to contribute, correct and find information.

Here’s how it started.

in July 2008, the library got a grant to cover the overhead cost of this extensive OCR scanning project. It included the launch of a free online service for full-text searching of newspaper articles.  Then the library invited volunteers to help by searching and correcting the OCR-scanned text, as well as adding subject tags to articles. Old newspapers are difficult to scan so it helps to have humans correct the results.

Volunteers uploaded and classified photographs to the Picture Australia public-domain photo library. By June 2010, there were 12,000 active volunteers had corrected 50 million lines of text.

Holley was overjoyed: “It’s amazing to think that we have 20 million articles awaiting correction, and in a year we will have 40 million. It’s an impossible, crazy goal, but in many ways that seems to inspire people.”

Reward Your Most Diligent Crowdsourcing Volunteers

The top text correcting volunteers received Australia Day awards for their efforts.

Leverage the Ways Your Volunteers’ Work Can Help Others

Articles from the service have been harvested and are now available from the Google News Archive Search.

Also the searchable Trove has grown to include maps, music, diaries, books, journals and more. One result? The library more than doubled its web services traffic to reach more than 2.5 billion hits in 2009.

Librarian Holley offers a vital insight that applies to all crowdsourcing projects: “People don’t want to be taken advantage of, so they are much more motivated to help a non-profit organization.”

There’s a simple, satisfying way to attract those who share your interests or seek your kind of product.  It enables you to demonstrate your expertise and it doesn’t take much time nor cost anything.

Sharing helpful tips with those who want them is more appreciated – and credibility-building – than self-promotion. In a time-starved world, the best way for people read your tips may be in a list they find online or via their smart phone. It helps people find you – and it’s a quick read.

The more specific the list the greater your chance of attracting the people you most want to reach.

Hint: Top Dog Breeds for People with Allergies. (I have yet to take my own advice here).

Your list can be a “best of” something such as books and sites on a topic or a David Letterman-style Top Ten countdown of relevant advice, or…?

For example, four of my interests are collaboration, connective conversation, human behavior and, as a paid speaker, conferences so I created a Twitter list of favorite people and organizations for each interest.

The bottom line is your list should catch the interest of the people you seek to reach.  They may be your peers, possible customers, or individuals who share your hobby, medical condition, belief, profession, industry or other interest.

Your list enables others to quickly:

•  Get ideas on a subject that interests them.

•  Know who you respect.

•  Understand a bit about your perspective and priorities.

•  Identify possible sweet spots of mutual interest.

•  Find you.

Once you’ve created your list you can share and update it online at several popular places where friends, kindred spirits and strangers are likely to find it:

• Your blog and/or web site.

• Twitter List – create several for the different parts of your life and find others who share your interests.

• Listiki – where you can invite others to add to your list.

• List of Bests – Make a list in one of three categories, personal, definitive or award.

• Posterous – where you can share your list without creating a blog.

• Facebook group page – see examples, Shareable and my Etsy where you can link to your list, first explaining why it is relevant to them.

• Linkedin group of people who have something in common – you can join or start a group, linking to your list as you would for your Facebook group.

• Ta-da – create and share “to do” lists for everything from organizations you respect to meeting agendas or famous quotes you don’t want to forget.

See him passionately reading the bible on the street corner, while being videoed?  Don’t avert your gaze and quickly walk around him. Take a closer look.

You may be witnessing a clever method that you could adapt to drawing attention to your favorite cause, idea, product or organization both in-person and online. 

Here’s how. While this public reading is part of a global campaign with an awkwardly defensive title in the “I don’t beat my wife” tradition, the underlying method is clever.

It takes a crowdsourced approach to involving fervent fans in drawing attention to their beloved book – the Bible.  The campaign, dubbed, “I Am Not Ashamed” invites Christians to take a friend with a video camera to a public place to stand and read a favorite bible verse.  They then submit their video clip to the web site. With so many people reading scripture the site will eventually have readings from the entire bible – a big deal for Christians.

What “First Ever” Can You Invite Kindred Spirits to Co-Create?

With this novel approach they are creating something valuable, and you can too. They’ll have a searchable video compendium of the Bible that can attract more believers and media attention as the project unfolds.

You could adapt this approach to involving your customers, fans or club members in highlighting something about which you have a shared interest.  You can get your project underwritten by businesses that also want to reach your “market” of participants.

For example, Matt danced with people around the world then invited others to create their own public dance and post it to his site. In so doing he drew a larger crowd and a sponsor.

As an author, you can boost book sales by inviting people to get a tool kit or start a group, based on your book.  Why not ask them to also submit videos that demonstrate some tip from the book?

Alternatively, how could your product be worn, used or demonstrated in inventive ways – inviting people to post their clips on your site?

What if your association or club members were invited to create a tag line for your organization or new program, then act out a scene that demonstrates it? Then you turned the submissions into a video vignette. Chapters of your member-based group could compete for the best video vignette.

Alternatively, invite all members to come to one place to act out their part in a movie of tips for people like them, as biznik did.

Reward People for Participating

To recognize the most popular submitters (thus encouraging more people to contribute) by enabling members to vote on their favorite submissions. The contributors of the top five most popular submissions win prizes (perhaps downloadable e-coupons) from your business partners that benefit from pulling your members into their place of business to redeem their prizes, the e-Coupons. 

Remember, when you attract a constituency you also attract a sponsor as Matt did.

Be sure to make it easy for people to find your crowdsourced video project, submit their video, brag about it, comment on other’s videos and invite friends to participate.

That means your project has a blog, Facebook fan page, and accounts on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Posterous account.

If a coffee shop owner and a former minister can make money by leading groups then, perhaps, so can you and I.  In the following success stories see if there’s a method you’d like to try. With the right approach people are happy to pay you for the opportunity to hone a skill they already have or to re-invent themselves. Perhaps you can re-invent yourself and gain more financial security and independence as you build a side or main business, teaching others what you know.

Why Teach Groups Rather Than Individuals?

Remember what Willie answered when asked why he robs banks? “Because that’s where the money is.” Learning by yourself isn’t as much fun as when in an actively engaged group.

Shared enjoyment reinforces an individual’s belief that they like the class and themselves while in it, research shows. That’s why people usually learn faster in experiential group learning.  Plus they bond with each other, admire you (the leader) – and are more likely to recommend the class to others. That’s a faster path to profitability.

Choose the Group Teaching Approach That Works for You

What skill can you teach others so they can secure more work from current clients and/or get to new clients – or launch into a new profession? Here are six extremely different (and profitable) kinds of group training:

1. Enable others to jumpstart a specific kind of business you know inside out. After many years as the owner of a popular coffee shop, Jake was restless for a change.  He almost became a customer service trainer for retailers because he loved teaching others. Then he realized he could show others the most efficient way to launch a coffee café. After working with a curriculum instructor he designed a set of six weekend long courses so that even those with a full-time work could be sufficiently prepared before they left their job.

Then Jake contacted several columnists and bloggers who covered food or small business and suggested that his unfolding story of changing how he worked might interest their readers. With their coverage plus referral from his café customers he filled his first class.  Now his class is filled by word of mouth.

2. Offer experts a new tool to sell to their customers. Beyond fixing furnaces, when HVAC contractors (a huge market) get trained as a group  – to sell and install whole home air cleaners, they have a new reason to call on customers.  In an upscale market. They can target homeowners with respiratory problems and those who’ve sealed their homes for energy-savings.  When group training includes practice in how describe the service to clients, by phone and in person plus a promo kit: “Breath Healthy Air at Home” of advertising templates and tips sheets for consumers, graduates of the training are ready to jumpstart their outreach – and make more money sooner.

3. Teach others to lead groups, using your content.  Therapists and life coaches who are fans of former Methodist minister Susan Page’s book, Why Talking is Not Enough, rave about it to their clients.  Susan offered them a way to make money by leading groups in learning the principles in her book.  For a fee, Susan provided a training manual. Thus she created a new profit center for herself plus a way to sell more books and build her fan base through her cadre of trained group leaders.

Artists, Jane Pollak and Rebecca Shapiro lead groups on how to turn their creative bent into a business.

Tongue Fu! author Sam Horn takes a different tack.  She personally trains and certifies groups of people to teach her content.  

Even if you aren’t a published author you could create a book based on your expertise and launch a similar train-the-group leader practice.  Create an online social network or group blog through which the graduates can stay in touch, compare stories, help each other hone their practice, refer others to the training and contribute suggestions for improving your training.  Of course, your book will be sold as part of the training. And you’ll reward contributing individuals with free eBooks from partnering authors with complementary expertise and with recognition in the book and in your future training.

4. Offer an intensive, group learning through projects experience. Once you’ve attracted a sizeable base of happy graduates and become more well-known for your work, you might launch a more in-depth opportunity for a group to learn together, as Seth Godin just did with his  crowdsourced alternative MBA program. In creating your steps to launch yours, read his innovative and efficient way to attract and organize participants in this experiential, project-based program.

5. Host an open-to-the-public seminar or series of seminars, using free social media tools like MeetUp (to announce the meeting details), Paypal (for payments). Although MeetUp is mainly used for enthusiasts who share an interest, many, like Edith Yeung are charging for meetings. For the niche market you seek to serve (the more narrow the more lucrative) you might lead a seminar and/or host other experts or panels to speak to your group’s specific interest.  Alternatively, you might post your class on Biznik (as a member) or Teachstreet.

6. Generate recurring revenue by providing follow-up opportunities

To deepen the loyalty and expertise in those you teach consider offering an ongoing program of learning.  That might include telebriefings that are recorded for member download, an annual gathering for graduates, a group blog, and contests for best suggestions for improvements. 

Create a community. Include online crowdsourcing features that enable those you’ve trained to get to know each other, share and compare their knowledge – and to be rewarded for their best contributions (as voted by co-members).

Rewards could include recognition on the site and giving credit to them, during future group training and in the educational materials.  Plus you may bundle gift packages for these highest-performing participants.  Since there are other experts and companies that want to reach the kind of people you teach, ask them for contributions to that gift package. Such contributions might include books, tapes, other products, one hour of individual coaching, etc.

Also offer special training for those who make the most valuable contributions to improving what you teach and/or who attract and lead the most groups.  Following the 80/20 Pareto Principle, your top 20 percent probably generate the most profits for you and for themselves.  I’m inclined to think it is actually your top five percent. 

Yet taking extraordinary care of all the people you’ve trained is not only the right thing to do, you never know which group leader will suddenly gets an insight that dramatically improves your training or has a group member who introduces your approach to a whole new niche market or attracts a media story that inspires new people to seek your training.

Ponder this:  In your industry or profession, what special skill could you teach that enables people to:

• stand out in their profession (job protection)

• differentiate their work from that of the competition

• enter a new market?

Are you interested in translating your expertise into group training as a new way to earn a living or to create a new profit center?  

Will you “simply” train groups and possibly certify graduates? 

Will you offer them a manual or learning kit or ongoing in-person and online training?

Will you foster a community around the work as a way of improving your content and enabling people to learn from each other?

Are you already leading groups, using your content or others?  I’d love to hear about your experience. 

What methods you are using to attract, train, recruit and reward new group members? 

What do you offer for free and how do you charge?

I’d love to learn from you and to share what you’ve discovered.

Instead of standing on a stage, one comedian at a time, humorists were leaning over their computers, waiting with bated breath for quirky Brit Tiernan Douieb to say “Go!”  In this Twitter Comedy Club experiment, drawing a crowd of 6,000 each comedian had a 10 minute act. They madly delivered their best lines in 140-characters, one after the other. Those attending the event simply had to search for tweets appearing with the event hashtag #tcgig. Some searched by smart phone and others by computer.

Out of the comedian line up came Tweets such as Mark Watson’s “My dad used to say, ‘Money: you can’t take it with you.’ Which led to some pretty boring holidays.” 

One participating comedy club, Pappy’s even created Terry Witter (@TerryWitter) a fake heckler.

Humor’s hard to create, especially under time pressure. If these comedians can generate so many ideas, crowd attention and camaraderie using this format, so can you.  This jam-packed, Twitter-based event could be adapted to other lifestyle topics (tips by and for cycling commuters, living well on less, etc.) or professional interests (customer-attracting tips by and for restaurant owners, etc.)

The bonus benefit for all participants?  The “content” that’s created by the event, generates lasting visibility for tipsters and sponsors.  Anytime you can see the ideas again as you can on the comedians’ Twitter accounts.

If you are adept at Twitter you could take on Tiernan’s role as a business. Offer to create such events for an association and/or businesses to sponsor themed events that would attract their members and customers. Such innovative uses show that, used smartly, Twitter can attract customers and potential collaborators.

… to identify those products for site visitors to then click and buy. That’s the mutually-profitable crowdsourcing angle for us and for Pixazza, a start-up that generated buzz because of support from Google Ventures. 

This tool may be especially hot for publishers of celebrity/gossip-style sites such as I’m Not Obsessed! which has been using the technology.

 Stephan Shankland calls Pixazza, “a photo-based version of Google’s AdSense.” That service, as many of you know, matches text on pages with relevant ads to display adjacent to it. Pixazza enables site visitors to click to the products they are interested in buying.

Anyone seeking more meeting participation may be discovering new ways by attending Obama-led town hall meetings. Some opinion leaders find Obama’s inferred endorsement of google tools jarring. Yet the three he’s using would be helpful to most any event planner, cause advocate, online entrepreneur or global team leader.  They are free, easy to use and scalable:

  AppEngine (a platform), Google Moderator (a tool to vote on which questions should be asked) and, of course, YouTube (for spreading the show – I mean meeting). At the platform you can invite participants to submit and to vote on the questions they want asked.  Yes, it’s crowdsourcing the “best” questions. And priceless visibility for google, with Katie Stanton’s involvement, when the questions are directed at Obama and on a top-of-mind-topic, the economy.  Enable participants to gain bragging rights - as they do for the town meetings - by inviting them to video themselves asking their question.

Grow your business faster by finding the sweet spot of mutual benefit that motivates others to support your success. Peruse 135 real-life examples to find one to adapt to your kind of work.  From customer-designed products to near-instant group help 

during a crisis to sharing self-tracked health results to requesting user-created demos - discover fresh ways to reward other’s involvement.  Some of my favorites on this “best ever” list are TomTom, Ushahidi and ideablob.  

Anjali Ramachandran, a Many by Many strategist, crowdsourced the creating of this valuable list.  Perhaps your inspired version will soon be added to it.  Hat tip to Marshall Kirkpatrick for coverage of this story that’s going viral.   Crowdsourcing is growing increasingly popular because it brings down overhead costs while bringing in customers .  Attract and keep more clients by co-creating with them a community that matters to them.

Update: car pool the easy way, getting connected with a trusted person online.  Yes, I discovered another practical crowdsourcing service. Share a car ride by finding a match in trip need via Zimride  - at their site or at Facebook. Enter where you are and your destination, then get an email alert when a match happens.

Choose where to live by asking locals about their neighborhood. Listen in on their conversations or jump in and ask their advice – from wherever you are.  That’s what Eric Wu promises renters with his online site that combines the online sharing and conversational powers of a wiki and Twitter. RentWiki. Get a feel of the neighborhood beyond what you see driving by.  How family-friendly is it, for example, if you have kids? Who else is moving in?  Why? What’s there to do nearby? Asking people who already live there enables you to get a better feel of the area. 

That is, if current residents feel motivated to spend time sharing their views and recommendations.  That’s the part of Wu’s business I don’t understand. Yet the site is user-friendly – and more power to him for being the first to try. Perhaps tie-ins with Yelp, outside.in and other local-based sites and services would draw more people who aren’t looking for a place to rent.

Clearly, such Twitter verticals are growing wildly popular. Why not start one to boost sales in a low-cost way? Or, more daringly, start a Twitter-based business? Here’s more stories to whet your appetite for the idea:

• WallHogs uses it to attract customers and turn their uploaded images

 into prints - over-sized vinyl wall hangings actually. Dell uses Twitter as a fast and low-cost way to sell discounted products. (Could you as well?)

• You could use it to create an instant, real-time straw poll or to research stocks at Stocktwits which “aggregates tweets from a group of Twitter users who are involved in trading and investment topics.” 

• Even golf club owners are haltingly tip toeing into social media by Twittering the media with press releases. (How did owners manage to abbreviate their releases to 140 characters?) Remarkably, Scott Beale used Twitter and other social media tools to fund his start-up.

• British baker Poke is tweeting customers to alert them when a fresh batch is out of the oven.

• Chris Savage trolls on Twitter to find people who need his private video sharing software.

As with all Wisdom of the Crowd-based ventures the value and profits you generate are dependent on the smarts and diversity of the participants.   Twitterers who figure out how to reward people for smart, active participation in their Twitter-based service represent the cream that will rise to the top of our attention.  Posterous has similar possibilities as a tool for entrepreneurs and for existing businesses and groups.  Watch it grow over the next six months.

What’s ahead for us? See this “presentation zen“-style global trends video from the Futures Group. It covers trends first described by Fareed Zacharia in his column and book. Teasers:

• In ten years the number one English-speaking country will be …

• By 2010, Africa’s largest trading partner will be …

That thought-provoking primer may tempt you to see their two other videos -The Big Little Economy and The Future of Food.  Plus their blog provides global coverage of Me2We ways to cooperate.  Neighbors can band together, for example, to grow and maintain plants and explore other kinds of urban homesteading. This echos the “back to the future” popularity of community gardens.