Playing to the Crowd
J.D. King
Crowdsourcing has shown great success, great promise and a number of red flags. In very short order, crowdsourcing has begun to affect just about everything. It has been five years since Jeff Howe’s article in Wired magazine coined the term to describe the practice of outsourcing traditionally in-house functions to large groups of outsiders in the form of an open call. What was then a burgeoning phenomenon exemplified by the open-source software movement, Wikipedia and eBay has proliferated into a “diverse landscape offering over a dozen distinct models for creating value with crowds,” according to Ross Dawson, a futurist and crowdsourcing expert. Today, for all kinds of start-ups, established businesses, and government agencies, some form of crowdsourcing is the model of choice for performing rote operational tasks at minimal cost as well as for analyzing data, messaging and marketing, funding, managing risk, driving innovation, and designing — and manufacturing — products. “The reality of global distributed work is going to change how we work, the work we do and the shape of organizations,” said Dawson. One of the more established crowdsourcing models is the service marketplace, an online meeting
place where companies post projects and freelancers bid for the work. Many of these are “microtask” platforms where large-scale projects are broken into many bitesize, web-based tasks which, though simple, require human intelligence. Perhaps the best known microtask platform is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, launched publicly in 2005, which at any given time offers hundreds of thousands of human intelligence tasks, or “HITs” — requiring skills such as transcription, categorization or translation. Registered users perform the tasks for, in most cases, pennies per HIT, making their money through volume and providing the businesses or individuals that use the service with an inexpensive, on-demand, scalable workforce. A number of companies founded in the last several years are based on variations
of the service model. oDesk, Elance, Freelancer.com, Clickworker, Crowdflower and Serv.io have expanded the concept to offer their user-clients task coordination and oversight, workflow management, guaranteed turnaround times and quality assurance. Clients are able to use them as on-demand agencies for special projects or to virtually staff departments or handle ongoing functions. Fees paid to workers generally correspond to the nature and complexity of the job. oDesk, for example, reports an average job fee of $5,000. Another popular crowdsourcing model, known as “crowdfunding,” is evolving rapidly as social media and micropayment technology have made it easy to secure donations from supporters at very low cost. At first it was primarily the province of political campaigns, charities and the arts, but more recently sites such as crowdcube.com are focusing on funding businesses rather than creative ventures and finding ways to offer investors equity. Increasingly, companies and organizations are using an open-competition model to tap into the crowd’s — or their customers’ — ability to make contributions to messaging, R&D and product development. In 2010, General Electric’s Ecomagination Challenge yielded promising ideas