Allsourcing

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= an extension of the idea of Crowdsourcing, by Patrick Philippe Meier

Description

Patrick Philippe Meier:

"A “crowd” is not still. A crowd moves, especially in crisis, which is my area of interest. So the term “allsourcing” not only implies collecting information from all sources but also the use of “all” technologies to collect said information in different media." (http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/end-of-crowdsourcing-2/)


Typology

Patrick Philippe Meier:

"the term “crowd” can mean a large group of people (unbounded crowdsourcing) or perhaps a specific group (bounded crowdsourcing). Unbounded crowdsourcing implies that the identity of individuals reporting the information is unknown whereas bounded crowdsourcing would describe a known group of individuals supplying information.

The term “allsourcing” represents a combination of bounded and unbounded crowdsourcing coupled with new “sourcing” technologies. An allsourcing approach would combined information supplied by known/official sources and unknown/unofficial sources using the Web, e-mail, SMS, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube etc. I think the future of crowdsourcing is allsourcing because allsourcing combines the strengths of both bounded and unbounded approaches while reducing the constraints inherent to each individual approach.

Let me explain. One main important advantage of unbounded crowdsourcing is the ability to collect information from unofficial sources. I consider this an advantage over bounded crowdsourcing since more information can be collected this way. The challenge of course is how to verify the validity of said information. Verifying information is by no means a new process, but unbounded crowdsourcing has the potential to generate a lot more information than bounded crowdsourcing since the former does not censor unofficial content. This presents a challenge.

At the same time, bounded crowdsourcing has the advantage of yielding reliable information since the reports are produced by known/official sources. However, bounded crowdsourcing is constrained to a relatively small number of individuals doing the reporting. Obviously, these individuals cannot be everywhere at the same time. But if we combined bounded and unbounded crowdsourcing, we would see an increase in (1) overall reporting, and (2) in the ability to validate reports from unknown sources.

The increased ability to validate information is due to the fact that official and unofficial sources can be triangulated when using an allsourcing approach. Given that official sources are considered trusted sources, any reports from unofficial sources that match official reports can be considered more reliable along with their associated sources. And so the combined allsourcing approach in effect enables the identification of new reliable sources even if the identify of these sources remains unknown." (http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/end-of-crowdsourcing-2/)


Example

Ushahidi is good example of an allsourcing platform.