Bill Sweeney, a 34-year-old Staten Islander, makes his living as a manager at an automotive parts warehouse. Last Saturday, he made his acting debut as a guest star on CurrentTV’s “Bar Karma,” which describes itself as “the first community-developed television series.”   Sweeney also helped write both this episode and two others — for free.

For Sweeney, the payment is in satisfaction. “All my creative stuff ends up being stuff I do on my own time for my own amusement. I mean, you find me someone who doesn’t have a script going in their drawer or the first 30 pages of a book,” he said. “Getting my ideas into the episodes and of course being on the show are probably like the highlights of my personal résumé.”

Bill Sweeney, left, makes his TV debut opposite “Bar Karma” regular Matthew Humphries. (Photo courtesy of Logan Mock Bunting/CurrentTV)

About five years ago, Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” to describe businesses that put out open calls to large, often unknown groups of people to carry out tasks, rather than giving a paid assignment to an employee or a contractor. Now though, crowdsourcing is also in vogue in the entertainment industry among producers, artists and writers and has become a popular new way to raise funds for a film, TV or Web project.

Sites like kickstarter.com, for example, allow producers to pitch ideas, solicit small amounts of money from lots of people and wait for their coffers to fill. And increasingly, crowdsourcing also is moving beyond just the funding of the project and into the telling of the story.

Last January, for instance, the Sundance Film Festival premiered “Life in a Day,” a feature-length documentary  entirely composed of clips uploaded to YouTube on July 24 last year, chosen and edited by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. The film will reach cinemas in July.

“Bar Karma,” which premiered in February, takes crowdsourcing into the world of fictional entertainment and asks its audience to provide storylines. “Bar Karma” is the brainchild of Will Wright, best known for creating the computer game “The Sims.” The show is set in a bar “behind time and before space,” which attracts new patrons each week and forces them to examine the choices they have made and then make a life-altering decision. (Think “Cheers” crossed with “Quantum Leap.”)

By crowdsourcing on the Internet and in online communities, “Bar Karma” could revolutionize the way television is made, but Will Wright believes that crowdsourced storytelling is a new way of carrying out an ancient process.

“We can go back to any old folk tale that’s been interpreted by multiple people,” he said. “Most of what we think of as classic stories and myths were really collectively constructed stories.”

What sets “Bar Karma” apart is the fans. Except, Wright doesn’t call them fans. He uses words like “community” and “dialogue.” That is not to say that he and his production have entirely handed over the reins of power. Wright paired with veteran film and TV producer Albie Hecht, who brought two decades of experience working with scripted drama and helped shape the structure of the stories and dealt with the practical issues of running a show.

To achieve this, Wright and his team spent five years experimenting with and developing Storymaker, a Web application for the “Bar Karma” community. Storymaker allows any community member to create, develop or give feedback on a scene or storyline suggestion that will eventually be put to a vote. Each suggestion is given a virtual card with a short description and small picture. The winners of the vote are then polished by the production team. Wright likened the process to “interpreting a graphic novel for the small screen.”

“What I think is unique,” said Wright, “is that we tried to build a hybrid between crowdsourcing at the idea generational level but have that smoother transition into professional production.”

Like any good story, this one has obstacles to overcome. For one, Wright had difficulty in selling the idea to traditional TV networks. When he pitched it to CurrentTV, he received a much warmer welcome — a result he believes is influenced by the company’s startup philosophy.

“CurrentTV thinks much more like a Silicon Valley company than a traditional Hollywood network,” said Wright. “They tend to do things that are a little more risky than the networks.”

Jay Golden, founder of Wakingstar Studios, is a story consultant. His company produces books, ebooks, adverts and viral videos for clients who need to tell a story. Wakingstar’s first production was a live storytelling show called “Journeys,” which interspersed professional acts with calls for the audience to step up to the mic and tell their own stories.

“It was pretty high-risk poker, because you never know what’s gonna be up there, but a lot of times when people just got up from the audience and told those stories, it had an incredible impact,” said Golden. “Ten years later, people still come up to me and say they remember that show.”

Since then, Wakingstar has produced a number of projects that utilize crowdsourcing techniques, including the short film “The Mouth Revolution,” which depicts mouths across the world rising up in protest at junk food.

There are ways of doing it wrong, too. For instance, an invitation can be too wide: “Help us make a video about the environment” doesn’t work. A better suggestion would be “Tell me something that you got in trouble for when you were a kid.” The real trick to getting people to do things for the project for little to no money, according to Golden, is to give them tasks they would already be inclined to do.

There are, however, limits to the technique.

“I don’t know if you can  tell any kind of story with crowdsourcing,” he said. “However, the matter of aligning people with a certain issue and giving them the opportunity to create their own piece of that, there can be a lot done on that front.”

Email: ho2205@columbia.edu