Crowdsourcing a Cookbook
With the new-year upon us, this is a time for family, fun and food! Having family members that love to cook (and are quite good at it) I’m always anticipating the next iteration of quiche or curry, hopefully not combined. Cooking is something many of us enjoy doing, so it was with great pleasure I stumbled upon an article about the Food52 website and decided to share it with our Solvers.
Food52 is a crowdsourcing website for people who love to cook: it is made up of a community of cooks initially signed up for the chance to contribute to the next cookbook by New York Times food critic and author Amanda Hesser and freelance food writer Merrill Stubbs’s by way of weekly, themed contests. Hesser and Stubbs will choose a list of finalists in each culinary category, but it is the community who will vote on the final selection of recipes to be included in the cookbook. In addition, the community will also choose the title, cover design and photos.
This is a truly crowdsourced project: participants contribute not just by submitting their own recipes, but also by editing others’ submissions with their own comments, ratings, and votes. Whoever made the finalist’s list will receive a free copy of the book and cookware specific to their recipe.
Hesser and Stubbs have finished the cookbook and will be published in 2010 by HarperStudio. However, they do promise that there are “more fun projects on the way, like video and photo contests!”
Check out the website – hopefully you’ll find a recipe in one of their 18 categories and feel encouraged to submit your own.
Tags: crowdsourcing for cooks, Food52
