We’re extremely proud to announce that nwzer’s wisdom of crowds machine will be funded by the Google Digital News Initiative. Starting in 2018, nwzer will work on this web-based collaboration tool, using the wisdom of crowds principles, assisted by machine learning (Artificial Intelligence), leading to the world’s first user-generated news agency.
Karim Maassen (@KarimMaassen) joined the fall incubation program at the Brightlands Innovation Factory on the 1st of November 2017 and recently demonstrated tremendous growth. nwzer won four consecutive weekly progress pitches and continuously surprised us with their ongoing achievements.
The Wisdom of Crowds machine: Real-time merging simultaneous multiple user inputs into one semantically correct article, ready for syndication.
Did you know that 62% of online news readers use Facebook as their primary news source? Yet, we don’t trust social media — or traditional media for that matter — anymore. And rightfully so.The attention- and advertisement-based media industry is broken. Fake news, misinformation and emotion-driven decision making is a direct symptom. Still, nwzer believes that every voice should matter. Everyone should be able to participate in the global discussion.
As I wrote earlier, user-generated content is active. Websites and services such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia allow for a broad spectrum of user inputs, potentially moldable into semantically correct and sensible articles. However, it has proven to be a huge challenge to actually stitch together these inputs. Parallel collaboration is prone to errors. Different inputs can conflict, erase or duplicate content. nwzer’s wisdom of crowds machine allows for smart stitching without the hassle of manual maintenance. We believe, this technology opens up a broad spectrum of collaboration, necessary for citizen journalism.