Welcome back, I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. This week, I wanna talk a little bit about a term I had never heard before, crowdsourcing. The very basic definition of Crowdsourcing is to take tasks which are usually solved by an individual to pose them to a group of people or community through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions (Wikipedia). Crowdsourcing in theory is a bit idealistic. To think that a problem can be posed to a group of people and then they will offer a free solution sounds in theory great but in reality a bit unrealistic. It was fascinating to see/read some of the varying views on crowdsourcing and than draw my own conclusions. Two of the varying and different perspectives I got to see were from the youtube video by Jeff Howe and the Forbes.com article by Dan Woods.
Call me a skeptic but I tend to side closer with Woods and doubt that any truly innovative work would be completed through crowdsourcing. Most things including wikipedia and the Netflix contest were fueled originally by individual contributions and than later put together and considered crowdsourcing. I tend to believe that all of the best innovations are created by extremely talented individuals as opposed to a group or collection of a less talented community. Albeit that community can improve on that product or help make it possible.
Thanks for reading
Josh
Sunday, January 24, 2010
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Its really interesting. I never heard of crowdsourcing before too. Its little idealistic and confusing idea..
ReplyDeleteI agree that crowdsourcing without incentives may not create outstanding final products. However, I think that before the notion of crowdsourcing is dismissed, its potential as a pay-service in which contributors receive compensation for their efforts should be strongly considered. The two sites that come to mind are crowdspring.com and 99designs.com, both of which seem to have been fairly successful in drawing upon the crowdsourcing concept.
ReplyDeletewithout incentives crowdsourcing has no benefit for its developers. most of the world wouldn't even bother to put forth the effort if they weren't getting something out of it. so i think for crowdsourcing to not be dismissed i do believe that the pay-service aspect needs to be explored, otherwise it might not survive.
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