Crowdsourcing
You've heard about outsourcing and insourcing and how the world got flatter through technology?
Crowdsourcing is a new term being tagged onto amateurs who use media technology (particularly the Net) to do jobs that were once done by the professionals. Examples: news organizations using free-lancers who write small pieces or gather research, stock photography houses selling amateurs' photos at very low prices, R&D departments that parcel out research to individuals.
A good example is the stock photo site called iStockphoto,which has images at prices like $1 a photo. They were doing well enough that they were bought out by Getty Images, which was the old style competition.
I first heard the term in an article in Wired magazine and then I heard the author, Jeff Howe, on The Brian Lehrer Show on NPR's WNYC
In another piece, "5 Rules of the New Labor Pool," Howe says that the new rules that crowdsourcing follows are:
1. The crowd is dispersed
People spread around the world can perform a range of tasks – from the most rote to the highly specialized – but this would-be workforce needs to be able to complete the job remotely.
2. The crowd has a short attention span
These new workers find time after dinner and on weekends. So jobs need to be broken into “micro-chunks.†Most tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk, for example, take less than 30 minutes to complete.
3. The crowd is full of specialists
For Procter & Gamble, the crowd is the world’s scientific community; for VH1 it’s any ham with a camcorder; for iConclude it’s the handful of professionals with experience troubleshooting Microsoft’s server software.
4. The crowd produces mostly crap
Networks like InnoCentive, Mechanical Turk, and iStockphoto don’t increase the amount of talent – they make it possible to find and leverage that talent. Any open call for submissions – whether for scientific solutions, new product designs, or funny home videos – will elicit mostly junk. Smart companies install cheap, effective filters to separate the wheat from the chaff.
5. The crowd finds the best stuff
Even as a networked community produces tons of crap, it ferrets out the best material and corrects errors. Wikipedia enthusiasts quickly fix inaccuracies in the online encyclopedia. Viewers of Web site YouTube find the one tastelessly funny amateur video from the 10 that are merely tasteless.
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