Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call.

Jeff Howe, one of the first authors to employ the term, established that the concept of crowdsourcing depends essentially on the fact that because it is an open call to an undefined group of people, it gathers those who are most fit to perform tasks, solve complex problems and contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas.

For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design or "design by democracy" and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm,human-based computation, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

Overview

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization. Jeff Howe has differentiated four types of crowdsourcing strategies:

Crowdfunding

Crowdcreation

Crowdvoting

Crowd wisdom

The use of the term has spread to include models where discrete work is distributed to individuals within the crowd. Companies such as CloudCrowd and CrowdFlower do not use classic crowdSourcing because the crowd does not all participate together, or collectively sort through solutions.

Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include the following:

Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly.

Payment is by results or even omitted (See this page on the German Wikipedia).

The organization can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organization.

By listening to the crowd, organizations gain first-hand insight on their customers' desires.

The community may feel a brand-building kinship with the crowdsourcing organization, which is the result of an earned sense of ownership through contribution and collaboration.

In his article, "Power of Crowdsourcing", Matt H. Evans contends that "Crowdsourcing taps into the global world of ideas, helping companies work through a rapid design process." This is usually available at relatively no cost, as people are always willing to share their ideas on a global scale.

Web-based crowdsourcing

With the increase of web applications' capabilities over the past two decades, the capabilities for crowdsourcing techniques has been greatly increased, and now the term often refers exclusively to web based activity. While the potential for web-based crowdsourcing has existed for many years, it hasn't been well implemented until more recently.

In an interview with Wired, Andrea Grover, curator of the 2006 crowdsourcing art show Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing, states that individuals tend to be more open in crowdsourced projects because they are not being physically judged or scrutinized. This ultimately allows for well-designed artistic projects because individuals are less conscious, or maybe even less aware, of scrutiny towards their work. In an online atmosphere there is more attention being given to the project rather than communication with other individuals.

An important example of web-based crowdsourcing, mentioned also in Howe's original book, is social bookmarking (also called collaborative tagging). In social bookmarking systems, users assign tags to resources shared with other users, which has given rise to a type of information organisation that emerges from this crowdsourcing process. Other important examples are web-based idea competitions.

[edit]Collaboratition

"Collaboratition" is a neologism to describe a type of crowdsourcing used for problems that require a collaborative or cooperative effort to be successful, but use competition as a motivator for participation or performance. A good example of collaboratition is the 2009 DARPA experiment in crowdsourcing. DARPA placed 10 balloon markers across the United States and challenged teams to compete to be the first to report the location of all the balloons. Collaboration of efforts was required to complete the challenge quickly and in addition to the competitive motivation of the contest as a whole, the winning team (MIT, in less than seven hours) established its own "collaborapetitive" environment to generate participation in their team.

Another form of collaboration can be found in the term of crowdfunding, inspired from crowdsourcing. Crowdfunding collaboration takes on a different role, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network pooling their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns. The Age of Stupid is perhaps the most publicized and successful case to-date; this film raised $1.2 million via crowd funding, and also used crowd sourcing to distribute and exhibit it around the world.

History

The term "crowdsourcing" is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing," first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing". Howe explains that because technological advances have allowed for cheap consumer electronics, the gap between professionals and amateurs has been diminished. Companies are then able to take advantage of the talent of the public, and Howe states that "It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing." A less commercial approach was introduced by Henk van Ess in September 2010: “Crowdsourcing is channelling the experts' desire to solve a problem and then freely sharing the answer with everyone”.

Projects which make use of group intelligence, such as the LazyWeb or Luis von Ahn's ESP Game, predate that word coinage by several years. Recently, the Internet has been used to publicize and manage crowdsourcing projects.