reCAPTCHA

Business type

Co-creation

Service/product description

reCAPTCHA is a free service that helps digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. They use “CAPTCHAs” to decode lines of text that their OCR program cannot. CAPTCHAs are programs that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer – images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms to prevent bots from using the website and from spamming. So what they do is, they use lines from books and newspapers recaptcha wants to digitalise but can’t be read by their OCR program as input for their Captcha program other people us to prevent from spam. So when people fill in the lines given by the captcha program (as a way to prevent spam) they actually help Recaptcha decode lines their OCR program can’t read.

What does 'openness' mean in this case?

Although people using the captcha to avoid spam are often not aware of helping out Recaptcha to decode lines, Recaptcha does give away a captcha program for free. So openness in this case is mainly about giving a product/service for free, but also about using consumers as a sort of co-creator in decoding scanned books.