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2006-05-31

CrowdSourcing

See: CrowdSourcing

Back in January of this year I blogged on smartmobs.com about an interesting blog posting from Jeff Jarvis.

The idea that I talked about at the time, inspired by Jarvis’ post was that:

…on the” individual” level, we want to control the things that we create (and, that if we can’t, we’ll go elsewhere). On the “collective” level, we “create as we consume” collectively, and that the “crowd” itself owns the “wisdom of the crowd”. If someone tries to “own” this crowd-wisdom generated from consumption, they make it less valuable by trying to disconnect it from larger networks to control it.

This shift in the way that things are designed and used was inspired by the success of open source software and the emergence of "Peer to Peer"(P2P) paradigms in ever growing areas of human problem solving. Some of the roots of these concepts extend back to work done at MIT, such as Gershenfeld’s Personal fabrication ideas, Frank Piller’s Mass Customization work, and Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Yochai Benkler also talks about commons based peer production concepts in his new book “The Wealth of Networks”.

Recently Wired Magazing published an article titled "The Rise of CrowdSourcing". This article looks at how this phenomenon is beginning to be taken seriously by people on all scales of the business world, from small independent business people to huge corporations and their R&D departments, television programming producers, and more. A quote from Jeff Howe’s Wired article:

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. …

Many companies growing up in the internet age were designed to take advantage of the networked world. But now the productive potential of millions of plugged-in enthusiasts is attracting the attention of old-line businesses, too. … Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.

See also: P2P Wiki "Crowdsourcing"

Discussion

Some limitations of crowdsourcing:

Thank you very much (nice blog btw)! There are definitely some limits to “Crowdsourcing”. Your two questions above are fundamental.

If you don’t mind, I am going to quote from your blog posting above the parts that are relevant to your two points listed by you above (just to make it clearer for others who might come across this):

from Limitations of Crowdsourcing

In many cases, persons and organizations don’t recognize the most important problems that they need to solve. Defining the problem is nine-tenths of the solution. That’s a cliché. It’s also true. If you don’t understand what the key problem is, you can’t get someone to solve it. This situation is pervasive in the communications industry.

In addition, for many business problems, solutions are quite difficult to evaluate. Solutions to the generic problem, “how to make a lot money quickly,” can be intelligently dismissed with little effort. Recognizing neglected, decision-relevant knowledge for narrower problems of mundane human behavior (economics) can be simply a matter of logic. But recognizing such knowledge can also require wisdom. Crowdsourcing cannot solve the problem of distinguishing between wisdom of crowds, and folly of crowds.

Your points above highlight the fact that most peer production systems that have been successful are usually hybrids of decentralized voluntary participants and a smaller closely connected and sometimes hierarchical core of decision makers.

I am going to create a page for this concept, called LimitiationsOfCrowdsourcing?.

Also, if you would be so kind, please sign your comments, as we are trying to apply UseRealNames here.-SamRose