For week 3, we will focus our attention on "YouTube - Jeff Howe - Crowdsourcing" and "The Myth of Crowdsourcing - Forbes.com".
Honestly, I must confess and say that if I were asked to define crowdsourcing I would have probably include the word crowd in my definition. However, I recently learned that "There is no crowd in crowdsourcing" from Dan Woods. It seems that many individuals like myself have a misconception of the term. They believe that crowdsourcing involves outsourcing work to a crowd. On the contrary, it involves outsourcing a problem to an online community, which could either be a small group of persons or a large number of people, who possess various forms of expertise. For example, Wikipedia can be considered as a good resource of crowdsourcing because articles are created, then corrected or improved by many different people.
Now that we understand the true meaning of crowdsourcing, I have a few questions for my readers. First, were you one of those individuals who misconceived what crowdsourcing meant and if you were, what did you think it meant?
Sunday, January 24, 2010
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I thought crowdsourcing meant businesses solicit innovate ideas and solutions from the online community (large or small) to meet its objective or problem. In the end, one person’s submission will be rewarded of the specified fee. Thus, there is a “crowd” in the sense that challenges are posted to an un-identified crowd for innovative solutions. Also, I do not think there is any collaboration involved to arrive at the solution. Thus, I am not sure that Wikipedia applies in this case.
ReplyDeleteWith respect to Wikipedia, articles are created and then posted on the site. Then readers like you and myself come along and may feel the need to improve the article. This may lead to other readers and writers following suit. In the end, we all contributed to the article but we may not have sat in the same room at the same time to make our contributions with respect to collaborating. Apart from the contests, submissions and rewards you speak of, crowdsourcing is also based on an open-source call which means anyone is free to submit their ideas. But if there is a small group then they are free to collaborate.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, I think of crowdsourcing as a pool of knowledge from random people. If you were to take five people from the street and give them a problem to solve, would they not collaborate to solve the issue? In the least, one person hypothetically could come up with solution by themselves.
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