People have long sought the knowledge and resources of the group, although it's only within the last few years that we've developed a word for it: crowdsourcing, a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing," according to Wikipedia, that repository of crowdsourced knowledge.
With that in mind, Marta Belcher, JD '15, devised a plan to revamp the traditional commencement address. Thinking "it was a shame" that a single student speaker "couldn't truly represent all of us," Belcher proposed an alternative: a "wikispeech," written and edited by any member of the class who wanted to participate.
She vetted the idea with a few friends, and then with their encouragement pitched the idea to the rest of her peers during class speaker elections. Not only did Belcher win, but she also swayed at least one of the other candidates.
Belcher then set up a web page where students could suggest themes and specific content for the speech. About 90 people from the 180-person class pitched in, resulting in a rough draft of more than 3,000 words. According to Belcher, "We decided very early that one of the things we wanted to talk about was attending law school during some of the most important civil rights struggles of our time." Dozens of students got together over the following weeks to tailor the speech to that theme and finished their final draft a few weeks prior to Commencement. Even the delivery was collaborative, with two classmates, Michael Mestitz and Ashlee Pinto, joining Belcher at the podium.
Although Belcher received most of the spotlight for coming up with the idea, she stresses that the speech was truly a group effort: "This project required members of the class to place a tremendous amount of faith in each other, and everyone really stepped up."
