Crowdsourcing

E-mail:

Password:


Forgot password?

03.06.2009

Among other neologisms and phenomena, crowdsourcing is one of the most popular.

Excuse me, whatsourcing?

Crowdsourcing.

The term doesn’t have a fixed definition. It can be explained as an act of outsourcing the task from the company to the crowd. It is somehow an open call for proposals and solutions presented by the businesses to a large group of people. The main idea of crowdsourcing is the usage of collective intelligence. As they say, two heads are better than one.

Past and Present

For the first time the term “crowdsourcing” was used by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 article in Wired magazine. Crowdsourcing became more popular with the development of Web 2.0, as the latter was enabling businesses to get an access to a large audience, somehow track it and manage. Just think about it- Facebook, Myspace, Odnoklassniki, Youtube,Twitter. Mass Web2.0 epidemics! Those are not just letting people to get to know each other, share information, but also those are great business tools.

Examples

Wikipedia could serve as the right example of crowdsourcing. Users all over the world create articles, edit them or delete. They do it for free. Why? You the crowd participate in such projects? Well,in some cases they achieve recognition, monetary prize or just kudos, intellectual satisfaction.

Pros

It saves money! It really does. You spent less on research, development or implementation. Also you get creative and innovative ideas.

Cons

The main problem is lack of control. The “crowd” is not your employee, you can’t demand anything and you can’t manage them in the way you want.

As a conclusion, crowdsourcing might work great for some businesses and might cause expenses to others. So, you need to think and plan before crowdsourcing. There is one thing for sure that two heads are NOT always better than one.