Topic: Communities of skilled people can serve as platforms for sourcing ideas, work, and solutions across industries. But how can we ensure that the new era of crowdsourcing actually empowers those that participate? (description)

Crowdsourcing is really an umbrella term, it encompasses a number of different things. June 2006 – term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe, it existed before that and has been utilized for decades. “Customer made” was one of the other terms going around at the time. Social media was on the rise, provided opportunities.

Common misconception – Crowdsoucing ONLY equals access to free labor. It can have other advantages as well. “Wisdom of the crowd”.

3 business models

Crowdsourcng wisdom – Wikipedia, Behance. Consensus based.

Crowdsourcing labor – Mechanical Turk, Traditional spec contests – An open call to complete or fill a specific task or need.

Crowdsourcing both (wisdom and labor) – Digg, Threadless – is most exciting. For Digg, labor is finding and adding items; wisdom is deciding what’s most interesting.

How sustainable is your source? (Crowds and Communities)

Crowd:

Common purpose

Based around an event

Interpersonal isolation – Like on an elevator or airplane. Because there is a start and end date, it’s not conducive for relationship building.

With crowds, sourcing exists in sprints. Crowd fatigue is a problem. It’s only the participation that makes you part of that crowd, if you stop acting you stop being part of it. Can get tiring.


Community:

Conditions affect the identity of the participants.

More sustainable – are inherently organic, are inherently adaptive. More than one thing glueing them together.

A community can evolve in a way that separates it from the brand. It can become its own thing – ex. if Harley Davidson went out of business tomorrow the communities that have created around the brand would probably go on.

As a business you are part of the community (not the owner).

[The take away seems to be that communities are often more sustainable, but which model you use depends on what you're doing, plus who you're trying to involve and how you're trying to involve them.]

Risks

Discount sushi - Satisfying a need of a moment, but doesn’t seem like such a good idea later (when you’ve got food poisoning).

Football team vs Strip club – Football team needs to work together; incentive for collaboration. Strip club – colaboration is counter productive; competing for a limited pool of money.  For sustainability you need increased collaboration. Need to do things better than non-crowdsourcing models.

Note: They did say they don’t know much about football or strip clubs. [Hmmm, crowd sourcing stripping... I'm sure it's been done already.]

Careless engagement – Apathy, carpet bombing (designer who makes one logo and submits it to many competitions). Antidote is connect it to reputation. If what you’re doing affects your reputation, you’ll care if it’s a good job. If incentive is money only, people will do the minimum and look for ways to game the system.

Wasted neurons – People spend tons of time working on stuff, and in the end most of it doesn’t get used.

No contextual reputation – Like playing a video game with only one level. Need to grow reputation. (On other hand, if you take away any chance to catch up with the people who have high reputation, that sucks for new comers.)

3 questions we should ask of any sourcing model

(Not a checklist, more to help gain understanding)

Can it foster a community?

  • Incentive for conversation and learning
  • To engage beyond a specific transaction
  • Is there a culture of collaboration?

But Mechanical Turk doesn’t satisfy any of these, and is still successful.

Does it tap collective wisdom?

Does the whole become greater than the sum of the parts?

Does it nurture participants?

  • Work benefits reputation
  • Participants are building relationships
  • Resources aren’t wasted
  • Terms and facts are crystal clear

[Yeah, that's four questions. Just how I wrote it down.]

Bottom line: Can have huge amount of trust with your community. Can screw up and appologize and they’ll believe you. Money can’t buy that kind of trust. They expect you to be true to who you are.