Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call.
Jeff Howe established that the concept of crowdsourcing depends essentially on the fact that because it is an open call to a 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[1] or "design by democracy" and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see 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.
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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".[2][3] 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.
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.[3] Jeff Howe has differentiated four types of crowdsourcing strategies:
Others have added:[4]
The use of the term has spread to include models where discrete work is distributed to individuals within the crowd. Microwork companies such as CloudCrowd and CrowdFlower do not use classic crowdsourcing because the crowd does not all participate together, or collectively sort through solutions. So-called "macrotask" platforms include Quirky, Innocentive, and Chaordix.
Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include the following:
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.[6]
Crowdsourcing has come in for some criticism for a number of reasons, such as it doesn't always produce quality results, and it is being used to source cheap—or even free—labour. When Facebook began its localization program in 2008, it encountered both these criticisms.[7]
For this reason, crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly used as part of a broader Creative Services Exchange model, where the 'crowd' is vetted in advance and professional agency 'brokers' facilitate the trading of creative briefs between companies and the 'crowd'.[8]
The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis.[9] Other differences between open source and crowdsourced production relate to the motivations of individuals to participate.[9][10]
Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use.[9] Urban and transit planning are prime areas for crowdsourcing.[11] One project to test crowdsourcing's public participation process for transit planning in Salt Lake City has been underway from 2008 to 2009, funded by a U.S. Federal Transit Administration grant.[12] Another notable application of crowdsourcing to government problem solving is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.[13]
A special type of Crowdsourcing is Buddysourcing. Buddysourcing is combination of Crowdsourcing and the word-of-mouth principles.One of the proceedings at ISPIM describes it as “the outsourcing of task, traditionally performed by an employee or a company, to the social networks (friends/buddies) of the individuals in a community through online task forwarding”.[14]
With the increase of web applications' capabilities over the past two decades, the capabilities for crowdsourcing techniques have 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.[15] 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.[16]
"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.[17]
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 crowdsourcing to distribute and exhibit it around the world.[18]
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) may provide one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing. An open call was made to the community for contributions by volunteers to index all words in the English language and example quotations for each and every one of their usages. In the 70 year project, they received over 6 million submissions. The making of the OED is detailed in The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester.
Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed provides early examples of crowdsourcing in theatrical performances. Boal's models give emphasis to the participants, and the influence their collaboration has on their performances.
In 1994, Northeast Consulting compiled a database of trends in the marketplace. This database was collected from numerous sources, offering an example of early crowdsourcing.[19]
Grover explained in an interview that crowdsourcing eliminates a financial barrier that prohibits most people from participating in art, as "Internet real estate is essentially free." Grover finds that the primary appeal of crowdsourcing is the satisfaction that is obtained through working with a community.
Individuals who participate in crowdsourcing projects are often anonymous, and Grover states that "people reveal more when they’re not face-to-face," because "there’s a certain security in not being physically present," which adds to the appeal of crowdsourcing.
Dion Hinchcliffe explains in his article Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons Its Not Just For Start Ups Anymore several reasons why businesses find crowdsourcing appealing. These include, but are not limited to, the ability to offload peak demand, access to cheaper business inputs, generating better results, and undertaking problems that would have been too difficult to solve internally. Crowdsourcing allows for businesses to submit problems in which contributors can work on, problems in science, manufacturing, biotech, medicine, etc., with monetary rewards for successful solutions. Businesses can crowdsource design issues, ranging from simple web design (Crowdspring) or more complicated design problems. Although it is difficult to crowdsource complicated tasks, simple work tasks can be crowdsourced cheaply and effectively. The testing of software and other services can be crowdsourced. Crowdsourced customer support allows businesses to rely on customers to solve other customers issues and questions.
The ethical, social, and economic implications of crowdsourcing are subject to wide debate. For example, author and media critic Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview published in Wired News, expressed ambivalence about the term and its implications.[20] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is also a vocal critic of the term.[21]
Some reports have focused on the negative effects of crowdsourcing on business owners, particularly in regard to how a crowdsourced project can sometimes end up costing a business more than a traditionally outsourced project.
Some possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing include the following:
Though some critics believe crowdsourcing exploits or abuses individuals for their labor, studies into the motivations of crowds have not yet shown that crowds feel exploited. On the contrary, many individuals in the crowd experience significant benefits from their participation in crowdsourcing applications.[24][25][26][27] Further authors discuss both risks and rewards of using crowdsourcing as a means of balancing global inequalities.[28]
Project's like Amazon.com's "Mechanical Turk" have, however, made significant advancement in addressing these issues in the last several years. "The Turk" seeks to empower firms, developers and creators of any kind by lubricating the relationship between them and crowds. It achieves this by creating a platform through which crowds and employers communicate and perform transactions in a way that is safe for both parties.
In Leah DeVun's interview of Andrea Grover, she answered affirmative to the question: "Do you think that crowdsourcing removes an economic barrier that might prevent people from participating in art?". Grover went on to explain that crowdsourcing was originally based on economics. It was designed for businesses to be cost-efficient and lower their expenditures.[15]
Grover also provided an example of a crowdsourcing project that went astray. Justcurio.us was a website where users would ask questions, and receive answers from other users visiting the site. It eventually degraded into people asking questions for pornographic purposes. Grover relates that "maybe just asking a question is too simple. Maybe there has to be more complexity."[15]
Crowdsourcing has attracted the attention of brand marketers as a way to engage customers using social media. Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" campaign is one prominent example of a fully integrated and successful program. Doritos fans created their own advertisements for the chance to win a trip to the game, $25,000 cash, and the fame of creating a Super Bowl advertisement. In 2011, four consumer-created ads for Doritos and Pepsi Max ranked among the top ten in the USA TODAY Ad Meter.[29]
Crowdsourcing for brands doesn’t always work. Levia, a medical device marketer, failed to generate crowdsourcing activity with a similar promotion. They lacked the prerequisites of a crowd, sufficient motivation, and a reasonable expectation of work effort.[30]