Reading Jeff Howe’s book you’d think crowdsourcing is the best thing since the invention of the company. Despite Howe’s stated intention to be impartial in his journalistic account of the rise, present, and future of crowdsourcing, it’s clear he’s in the evangelist camp. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except you won’t learn much about the drawbacks of crowdsourcing from this book.
Crowdsourcing: A summary
According to the crowdsourced Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is the “act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor and outsourcing [them] to a group of people or community”.
Thanks to the Internet, crowdsourcing democratizes knowledge by flattening the hierarchy of the expertise-based economy: everyone has expertise that businesses can tap into. Crowdsourcing allows companies to harness the collective intelligence of large numbers of diverse individuals making autonomous decisions in online communities self-organized into workforces.
In short, crowdsourcing is a perfect expression of the Japanese proverb, “None of us is as smart as all of us”.
Actually, not all of us. First, Sturgeon’s Law stipulates that 90% of everything is crap. Ninety percent is also the ratio of Internet users who only consume online content. Nine percent will do something here and there, and only one percent will make any significant contributions. Though the beauty of the crowd is its numbers, “the crowd” is but a one-percent slice of the Internet population. Rather than democratize, crowdsourcing oligopolizes knowledge.
Secondly, while crowdsourcing can be done without it, the Internet really gave crowdsourcing its legs – scalability and effectiveness. Internet – preferably broadband – access is a requirement for participation. Without the toy, you can’t play.
I’m not one to claim we must aim for 100% inclusiveness in everything. I am arguing that we should make our terminology and concepts more reflective of reality.
The utility of crowdsourcing
The crowd can propose innovations (idea jams) or solutions to problems (crowd-casting). The crowd can predict outcomes of events. The crowd can create or design products (crowd-creation). The crowd can filter information by voting (crowd-voting). The crowd can fund projects (crowd-funding). Some of the best applications of crowdsourcing appear where a large amount of data is required and supplied by the crowd.
Crowdsourcing does require planning, organization, leadership, management, customers, and a business model. In other words, though crowdsourcing blurs the line between production and consumption in business, it’s not a magic bullet – it requires you to be a business, first and foremost. Crowdsourcing needs companies to put the crowd to work.
Howe offers many stories of successful and not-so-successful crowdsourcing efforts. The problem is, many stories are not new. That I’m tired of reading about Threadless, InnoCentive, Wikipedia, or Linux may be my problem. That these examples are anomalies and thus not the best models to follow deserves consideration.
Crowdsourcing in sustainable marketing
I’m a cautious fan of crowdsourcing; the sustainability unconference Beyond2020, which utilizes Open Space technology and which I co-coordinate, is my way of using crowdsourcing. The benefits of crowdsourcing from the standpoint of sustainable marketing include:
- Fulfillment. Crowdsourcing enables those with needed expertise to demonstrate it and put it to good use. It allows people to contribute to something larger than themselves, fulfill their aspirations, and, in some forms, generate wealth. (Self-actualization is a major reason for participation, though it only gets a note on the book’s last page.)
- Peer learning. Everyone is an expert in something, if only by the token of their individual experience. Crowdsourcing enables people to learn from one another rather than just from “experts” or “thought leaders”.
- Collaboration. Crowdsourcing facilitates “working with and for the sake of others”, as Howe points out. It cultivates community, if only the online kind.
Two objections to crowdsourcing are above: the thinness of the crowd, and access. Another one entails compensation. Some forms of crowdsourcing – social production – put the crowd to work for profit without monetary compensation, substituting meaning and self-actualization for compensation. If you’re going to make money with the crowd’s help, you need to compensate the contributors.
By fragmenting knowledge crowdsourcing also changes its power dynamics. The transition from closed, proprietary, and expensive knowledge owned by companies to open, available, and cheap wisdom of the crowd doesn’t eliminate the power dynamics between corporations and the public, it only shifts it. It distributes the power centralized in a corporation to a large number of actors, establishing an alternate, Foucaultian micro-power structure.
Oh yeah, and do read the book, though I recommend checking it out from the library.
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Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, New York: Crown Business, 2008.
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