User:Digiterata/CrowdsourcingDraft

"Crowdsourcing" is a neologism for a business model that depends on work being done outside the traditional company walls: while outsourcing is typically performed by lower paid professionals, crowdsourcing relies on a combination of volunteers and low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D. The term was coined by Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe and editor Mark Robinson in June 2006.

Crowds targeted for crowdsourcing include garage scientists, amateur videographers, freelancers, photo enthusiasts, data companies, writers, smart mobs and the electronic herd.

Overview
While not a new idea, crowdsourcing is becoming mainstream. Open source projects are a form of crowdsourcing that has existed for years. People who may not know one another work together online to create complex software such as the Linux kernel, and the Firefox browser. In recent years internet technology has evolved to allow non-technical people to participate in online projects. Just as important, crowdsourcing presumes that a large number of enthusiasts can outperform a small group of experienced professionals.

Advantages
The main advantages of crowdsourcing is that innovative ideas can be explored at relatively little cost. Furthermore, it also helps reduce costs. For example if customers reject a particular design, it can easily be scrapped. Though disappointing, this is far less expensive than developing high volumes of a product that no one wants. Crowdsourcing is also related to terms like Collective Customer Commitment (CCC) and Mass Customisation. Collective Customer Commitment (CCC) involves integrating customers into innovation processes. It helps companies exploit a pool of talent and ideas and it also helps firms avoid product flops. Mass Customisation is somewhat similar to collective customer commitment; however, it also helps companies avoid making risky decisions about what components to prefabricate and thus avoids spending for products which may not be marketable later.

Types of crowdsourced work

 * Steve Jackson Games maintains a network of MIB (Men In Black), who perform secondary jobs (mostly product representation) in exchange for free product. They run publicly or semi-publicly announced play-tests of all their major books and game systems, in exchange for credit and product.  They maintain an active user community online, and have done so since the days of BBSes.
 * Procter & Gamble employs more than 9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R&D and still have many problems they can't solve. They now post these on a website called InnoCentive, offering large cash rewards to more than 90,000 'solvers' who make up this network of backyard scientists. P&G also works with NineSigma, YourEncore and Yet2.
 * Amazon Mechanical Turk co-ordinates the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.
 * YRUHRN used Amazon Mechanical Turk and other means of crowdsourcing to compile content for a book published just 30 days after the project was started.
 * iStockphoto is a website with over 22,000 amateur photographers who upload and distribute stock photographs. Because it does not have the same margins as a professional outfit like Getty Images it is able to sell photos for a low price.  It was recently purchased by Getty Images.
 * Cambrian House applies a crowdsourcing model to identify and develop profitable software ideas. Using a simple voting model, they attempt to find sticky software ideas that can be developed using a combination of internal and crowdsourced skills and effort.
 * A Swarm of Angels is a project to utilize a swarm of subscribers (Angels) to help fund, make, contribute, and distribute, a £1 million feature film using the Internet and all digital technologies. It aims to recruit earlier development community members with the right expertise into paid project members, film crew, and production staff.
 * The Goldcorp Challenge is an example of how a traditional company in the mining industry used a crowdsource to identify likely veins of gold on its Red Lake Property. It was won by Fractal Graphics and Taylor-Wall and Associates of Australia but more importantly identified 110 drilling targets, 50% of which were new to the company.
 * CafePress and Zazzle, customized products marketplaces for consumers to create apparel, posters, cards, stamps, and other products.
 * Marketocracy, to isolating top stock market investors around the world in head to head competition so they can run real mutual funds around these soon-to-be-discovered investment super-stars.
 * Threadless, an internet-based clothing retailer that sells t-shirts which have been designed by and rated by its users.
 * Public Insight Journalism, A project at American Public Media to cover the news by tapping the collective and specific intelligence of the public. Gets the newsroom beyond the usual sources, uncovers unexpected expertise, stories and new angles.

External links and references

 * The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired June 2006.
 * Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators, BusinessWeek July 2006.

Categories

 * Category:Technology neologisms

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