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Asking The Creative Crowd Nicely: The Itty Bitty Chainpaws Case Study

OK, brief backstory. Chainpaws are animals with chainsaw hands. It’s a storyverse concept I worked on a while ago. That is all. You may proceed… :)

Last year I put a few dollars into Mechanical Turk to commission images of chainpaws for $0.20 each from total strangers. People were given an example chain paw. I told them not to take a lot of time, and just get it done, either photoshopping or drawing the image. As long as it showed an animal with chainsaw paws, it would work and be accepted.

What I got back was interesting! I sort of viewed it as a creative distraction from what I was focused on doing at the time so I didn’t dig too far into what it meant that I quickly got back new content after a small request like that. Here are some of the chainpaws, and here’s a flickr gallery of chainpaws, some made on Mechanical Turk, with a few ringers in there at the top and bottom (like the awesome drawing up above by my friend Erin Ellis):

This whole batch plus more came back from multiple different people in just a couple of days, with many of them wanting to do more. It’s pretty darn cool, especially when you consider how little effort and how little reward there was at the outset.

Man, if we can set up a better system for this, we’ve got a powerful force on our hands, and it’s the sort of thing any modern radical asking system(tm ;)) would enable in spades.

Maybe all you have to do is ask and credit, ask and credit. Here’s to finding out.

“Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.”