“Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”
This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.
(Left, Geoff Howe, of Wired Magazine, who coined the term Crowdsourcing.)
Crowdsourcing is the application of Open Source principles and has several benefits, including: speed of response, cost-effectiveness (payment is low or non-existent), and a much broader range of ideas and talent can be applied to the problem. It can be combined with crowdvoting.
Famous Crowdsourcing projects include: Wikipedia, CrowdFlower, Guardians MP Expense scandal, InnoCentive R&D, Katrina People Finder, Flickr, YouTube, Lego MindStorms, Threadless, TrendWatching, Mechanical Turk, and P&G Connect.
“The best person to do a job is the one who most wants to do the job, and the best people to evaluate their performance are their peers.”
In practice, the term Crowdsourcing is used to cover 4 distinct kinds of activities.
1. Competitions open to the public to design new flavours, new ads, new cars….
often using specific software to allow people to manipulate certain aspects of the product. The most high profile is the Crash the Superbowl competition for Doritos and Pepsi Max.
Doritos Crash the Superbowl Finalist 2011
2. Communities for specific tasks, or ‘service marketplaces.’ For example communities of designers for logos, or communities of consumers, clients etc, for New Product Development. There is some criticism of exploitation in the former case, as several designers put forward ideas but only the winner gets paid.
3. An open innovation market, e.g. Innocentive, where the problem owner (or ‘seeker’) posts up their issue, which is then answered by ‘problem solver’s’ – who might come from a completely different knowledge base or perspective.
The last category isn’t one category at all, but a mixed bag that includes Crowdfunding, Distributed knowledge, Crowdlabour and so on. It ranges from getting scientists to help classify astronomical data ( http://www.planethunters.org/), to crowdfunding for charity (HelpersUnite.com), to shaming Lebanese drivers into adopting better driving habits. Residents are asked to take photos of bad driving which are posted on a public website. In India the ‘I Paid a Bribe‘ website allows bribes to be anonymously reported but is able to aggregate and analyse the data, a great tool in the fight against corruption.
