Crowdsourcing

I understand crowdsourcing as kind of an industrial age, corporatist framing of a cultural phenomenon. There’s human energy being expended here. A company can look at that as either a threat — to their copyrights and intellectual property or as some unwanted form of competition — or, if they see it positively, then they see it as almost this new affinity group population to be exploited as a resource.

- Douglas Rushkoff [1]

Introduction

Crowdsourcing is a concept from an article in Wired magazine on the emergence of Distributed Labor Networks.

It refers to the usage of distributed, voluntary collaboration from a wide community of users/participants, used in the context of commercial value generation and innovation. It can be associated with Revenue Sharing strategies.

Please note that when there is a direct connection between production and payment, crowdsourcing then differs from non-reciprocal Peer Production

A related term used in the media field, and not necessarily connnected to commercialization, is User-Generated Content

Also the title of a book on the subject, by Jeff Howe. [2]

Definition

1.

"Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call." (http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/advertising/index.html)

2.

"crowdsourcing involves paying (often very small amounts of money) for the content produced by crowds of people. This model does not likely lead to exceptional content by passionate people, but rather acceptable content by people motivated largely by money. This type of content, I believe, does not support the readership ratios seen in Wikipedia and digg, and you can verify this by visiting some sites that are known to crowdsource.

I put it out to you, that instead of budgetting for crowdsourcing, your money would be better spent catering to your 1% of passionate users." (http://blog.productwiki.com/2007/02/wisdom-of-crowds-nay.html)

3.

"the basic idea is to tap into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider. Yet free labor is only a narrow part of crowdsourcing's appeal. More importantly, it enables managers to expand the size of their talent pool while also gaining deeper insight into what customers really want." (http://www.bnet.com/2403-13068_23-52961.html)

Discussion

How Crowdsourcing differs from Peer Production

Peer production is defined by:

- voluntary engagement

- a participatory process

- universal access property regimes

- there is no direct link between input and output (non-reciprocal character of peer production)

Most corporate-driven crowdsourcing will only apply the very first principle, i.e. voluntary engagement; they will aim to drive the production process; and the results will be proprietary. Finally, they will introduce payment or Revenue Sharing schemes. In terms of the hierarchy of engagement, crowdsourcing is more akin to swarming than to the collective intelligence of an intentional community.

A Critique of the Crowdsourcing meme

Hugh McGuire how it differs from community production:

"Apart from the unfortunate outsourcing connotation, crowdsouring completely misses this point (which is something I have thought a lot about at LibriVox):

that what goes *in* is more important than what comes *out*.

crowdsourcing sounds like it is about extracting resources from a crowd (like a strip mine, exploiting resources)… when in fact the real power (and beauty) is in creating a community that wants to contribute *into* something.

I think you will find common elements that crowdsourcing doesn’t catch:

1. people want to contribute to the public sphere (with idealist motivations)
2. participating in the project becomes a highly social, almost family-like activity

in short, the opposite of crowd, and the opposite of sourcing" (http://www.billionswithzeroknowledge.com/2006/10/30/crowdsourcing-community-production-hugh-mcguire-libribox-interview/)

• Evan Prodromou's talk on WikiCommercialization ~~ MarkDilley

Citation from Jeff Howe

Jeff Howe: "Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains.

For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected to the network.

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."

Read the article at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Examples

Three first examples are from the Business Week article at http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2007/id20070118_768179.htm

Swarm of Angels

URL = http://www.Aswarmofangels.com

"This British open source film project takes on Hollywood's traditional business model, aiming to create cult cinema for the digital age. Subscribers—the "angel" investors that "swarm" to create the site's name—pay roughly $50 (£25) each to join. The site aims to draw 50,000 angels to create a film with a $1.8 million budget. Eventually, the community will vote to decide which film will be made." (http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2007/id20070118_768179.htm)

CafePress

http://www.CafePress.com

"This Foster City (Calif.)-based online retailer lets members create, buy, and sell merchandise. Entrepreneurs Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain founded the site in 1999 to let members—the site reports 2.5 million—transform their artwork and ideas into new products and sell them through an online storefront with no up-front costs or inventory to manage. Members can also personalize their own gifts by adding touches to one of 80 available products. CafePress.com sets a base price on products and takes care of printing, packaging, processing payments, and customer service; sellers decide how much to charge for their products." (http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2007/id20070118_768179.htm)

Crowdsourcing Platforms

CrowdSpirit

http://www.Crowdspirit.org

"This French startup plans to use crowds to develop and bring to market tangible, inexpensive, electronic devices such as CD players, joysticks for video games, and Web cams. The community will handle all aspects of the product cycle—its design, features, technical specifications, even post-purchase customer support." (http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2007/id20070118_768179.htm)

See also: Cambrian House; and Kluster

More examples

The article mentions Innocentive as an example of the process.

"YourEncore, for example, allows companies to find and hire retired scientists for one-off assignments. NineSigma is an online marketplace for innovations, matching seeker companies with solvers in a marketplace similar to InnoCentive."

Rent A Coder [3]

From http://www.bnet.com/2403-13068_23-52961.html:

Netflix, the online video rental service, uses crowdsourcing techniques to improve the software algorithms used to offer customer video recommendations. The team or individual that achieves key software goals will receive $1 million.

Eli Lily and DuPont have tapped online networks of researchers and technical experts, awarding cash prizes to people who can solve vexing R&D problems.

Cambrian House lets the public submit ideas for software products, vote on them, and collect royalties if a participant's ideas are incorporated into products.

iStockphoto.com allows amateur and professional photographers, illustrators, and videographers to upload their work and earn royalties when their images are bought and downloaded. The company was acquired for $50 million by Getty Images.

Threadless.com lets online members submit T-shirt designs and vote on which ones should be produced.

Case Studies

Examples from an article at http://www.bnet.com/2403-13068_23-52962.html

Proctor & Gamble

"During a 2002 Proctor & Gamble brainstorming session, a company manager had a flash of inspiration: Why not print text or images on Pringles potato chips? Great idea, but there was a catch: no one at P&G knew how to do it. To find the expertise it needed, P&G tapped into RTC North, a network of European scientists, and found a small bakery in Bologna, Italy, run by a professor who had invented a technology that uses ink-jet techniques to print pictures on pastries. By licensing the technology, P&G was able to launch the new Pringles Prints chips in less than a year—and at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house. Indeed, after decades of rarely looking outside its own walls for ways to improve brands like Pringles and Crest, P&G now taps the brainpower of scientists around the world by using crowdsource research networks like Innocentive.com and YourEncore.com. The result: 40 percent of the company's new innovations now come from outside P&G, up from 10 percent in 2000."

O'Reilly Media

How do you know if your products receive adequate placement on store shelves? Executives at O'Reilly Media, a privately held company best known for publishing technical manuals, heard anecdotal stories that its books were difficult to find in big chain bookstores. Sending teams of market researchers from store to store would have been prohibitively expensive, so the company instead turned to an online user group devoted to its books. O'Reilly sent email to members of the group, soliciting volunteers to visit local booksellers and submit monthly reports of what titles were on the shelves. Some 500 people volunteered, and 75 of those happened to live near bookstores that were of particular interest to O'Reilly execs. For three months, the volunteers submitted spreadsheets to the company, along with anecdotal impressions of their experiences inside the stores. In return, O'Reilly gave the volunteers free books. "It answered our question: Are bookstore chains doing a decent job getting our books on the shelves?" says Sara Winge, O'Reilly spokeswoman. "Turns out, the stores were doing a pretty good job, but that was a very hard question to answer without having volunteers who were willing to actually go see for themselves."

Key Books to Read

• Crowdsourcing: How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. Jeff Howe. Random House, 2008.

Review:

"Crowdsourcing poses a profound challenge to the conventional notions of the structure of the firm as a fundamental economic unit. It suggests that the traditional demarcations between suppliers, contractors, employees, distributors and customers are breaking down.

The ideas in this book are not all new. But it does bring the concept alive with rich and detailed case histories. It is the product of a well-connected and talented journalist. It is carefully researched and crisply written, and the phenomenon it describes is here to stay." (http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/search/article/842430/books-collectivism-capitalism/)

More Information

1. Guide to the Crowdsourced workforce: mentions different projects, especially in the field of design]
2. See our entry on the FLIRT Model of Crowdsourcing
3. The trend will be monitored here, at http://www.crowdsourcing.com/ and here at http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/
4. Microstock Photography is often mentioned as an example of the process.

Blogs

1. Crowdsource This
2. Crowdsourcing Directory

Podcasts/Webcasts

1. Podcast interview with Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing
2. Video trailer of his book
3. Webcast presentation of Don Tapscott on Crowdsourcing