Crowdsourcing:Why the Power Of The Crowd Is Driving The Future Of Business”

By Catherine Cole Ferandelli and Ana Luiza Valverde da Silva

Crowdsourcing , according to Wikipedia (a crowdsourcing phenomena itself) is “the act of outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to a large group of people or community (a crowd) through an open call.” While traditional dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster have not added “crowdsourcing” to their word inventory, the term has become nearly main stream since Jeff Howe published his book in 2008.

Howe’s book carefully defines and illustrates the act of crowdsourcing in an organized and easy to follow format beginning with an introduction followed by sections describing crowdsourcings’ past, present and future.  Within, Howe performs a diligent and consistent argument that crowdsourcing is a productive and effective method for businesses to evaluate and improve their existing products as well as introduce the new.  Google, for example, is noted by Howe as a search engine that not only uses crowdsourcing to organize, but also to evaluate its new and existing programs, such as Google Earth.  Successful crowdsourcing methods (contests with monetary rewards, for example)  performed by Google provide Howe with plenty of support that the crowd is able to filter out the “diamonds in the rough” from the vast quantities of the mediocre or worse.

Howe does an effective and thorough job of describing how the “crowd”, when properly directed, gives business fresh, productive and useful data. Starting with the individual, Howe says there is a “shadow labor force in America.” This force of people, passionate amateurs (hobbyists and enthusiasts so to speak) are increasingly competing and collaborating with professionals in fields from the sciences to journalism.

The professionals provide more sophisticated and educated input. The amateur provides fresh enthusiasm and passion. The lines between them are becoming increasingly blurred. This combination is the energy of the phenomena Howe describes as the “crowdsourcing machine.”

Although Howe speaks of this “shadow force” in American terms, the “crowdsourcing machine” is alive, well and growing worldwide as the force of the Internet gains further access to increasingly more sectors of the global population.

How did crowdsourcing get its start? Who was instrumental in taking the knowledge of the crowd and using the Internet to grow the crowdsourcing phenomena worldwide?

Howe believes crowsourcings’ start began with the rise of the amateur.  Howe’s definition of the amateur (he terms the amateur a “Pro-Am”) is an individual who works at professional standards, is not motivated by money, gains satisfaction participating, provides input towards their passion and has the leisure time to do so.

The collaboration of “Pro-Ams” combined with cheap and easy Internet access has created a modern society of individuals satisfying their passions and, at the same time, providing a “fresh set of eyes” to view, tweak and fine tune that passion. Howe sites mainstream firm IBMs revamping of its business model from protecting its proprietary software to even donating some of its patents to the open source advocacy group Free Software Foundation,  thereby “throwing” once fiercely protected property to the interested crowd.  The income generated by IBMs providing “professional services” related to open source software (with valuable feedback from the IBMs “crowd”)  has more than made up for revenue lost through licensing proprietary software.

Howe effectively describes the history of crowdsourcing and makes clear his point that it did not originate with the Internet. Taking the individuals’ need to share a passion with others, Howe describes late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England and European aristocracy as a society that valued “knowledge for knowledge sake.” This sector of society had the money and leisure to devote time to collaborating at “gentleman’s clubs.”  The Invisible College, a group of philosophers, doctors, amateur astronomers and mathematicians founded in 1646 is an example of an “amateur” institution of higher learning devoted to that purpose.

The Invisible College illustrates an excellent “pre-Internet” comparison of the passionate amateur with today’s web connected Pro-am. Both have greatly advanced  human knowledge.

Another collaboration of a creative crowd was the development of the open source code movement. Developed by such individuals as MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman, individuals worked together to play a big part in developing crowd sourcing as we know it today by fine tuning and democratizing access to cheap, easy to understand software.  Stallman separated himself from MIT and founded the nonprofit Free Software Foundation (FSF) to “promote computer user freedom and defend the rights of all free software users,” states FSF.

At the same time (1991) a Finish computer scientist student named Linus Torvalds was creating a free operating system as a hobby. Torvalds’ system, named Linux was developed by calling on fellow amateur coders to “chip in” to fine tune, develop and “debug” the operating system. Linux still uses a General Public License, creating and sustaining a collaboration of coders that continue to improve the Linux system quickly, efficiently and inexpensively even today.

The consequence of cheap and easy operating systems resulted in a blurring of the separation of the producer and the consumer. Amateurs can now afford to utilize inexpensive, user friendly systems to create and empower themselves with the ability to share their passions with others. Media, including “Pro-Am” publishing, filmmaking, photography and music are according to Howe, the forefront of the Internet crowdsourcing movement.

Crowdsourcing stimulates collective intelligence, by creating a group process of acquiring and sharing knowledge of the groups’ shared passion.  The process of crowdsourcing has been facilitated by the Internet more than any other medium. Howe says that collective intelligence works better in practice than it does in theory. It would seem that a small collection of expert scientists would be far better suited to solve a scientific problem than a group of scientists combined with “brown socks” (laymen), but such is not the case.  The crowd includes individuals possessing many different talents that can now be easily accessed to attack problems that previously challenged professional scientists.

Managing the talents of the individuals within the crowd, however, is difficult to establish and more difficult to maintain and evolve as the crowd becomes further involved in their “community.” Howe illustrates this by sharing his experience of organizing an experimental journalistic project called Assignment Zero.

Assignment Zero was a joint effort between “Wired” magazine and  NewAssignment.Net. The goal of the project was to involve professional and amateur contributors, on a volunteer basis, to write on how crowds of volunteers are overturning the way traditional businesses operate. The result was supposed to produce the best knowledge base to date on how crowdsourcing affects “old school” business operations.

Initially poor online organization of the project’s website, a vague conception of crowdsourcing and lack of access to management confused the large numbers of volunteers who decided to “go away.” When topics were described in more detail, a more specialized crowd understood the projects purpose and responded to them with passion and knowledge. Assignment Zero initially failed due to unclear instruction and purpose. Once realized, failure became a positive step in quickly reassessing the project utilizing detail that appealed to the target audience. Quality input was resulted and the project, when completed, was deemed a success.

But Howe doesn’t dwell much on failure in “Crowdsourcing.”  He mentions the Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything, and user content in general is crap”) but doesn’t use many examples to illustrate the strength and validity of it. Crowdsourcing is difficult to manage and maintain on any given subject and Howe provides little to emphasize this fact. Instead, he states that the value in the crowd is the ability to correct themselves by taking large quantities of “low-quality” fare and finding the best and the brightest within.

“Crowdsourcing” is a book written with a voice that exhibits more positive excitement than fear. While Clay Shirkey’s book “Here Comes Everybody” uses the on-line search of “It Takes A Village To Find A Phone” as an example of individuals gathering and collaborating to find a stolen cell phone, Howe emphasizes the crowds ability to make products and services better for all.  Although in his conclusion, Howe discusses Cambrian Houses’ selling of their crowdsourcing software to venture capital firm Spencer Trask as a bit of a failure, more importantly, he emphasizes Google as a huge movement that isn’t doubting crowdsourcings’ efficiencies for the greater good.

Clearly Howe believes crowdsourcing has a positive and long reaching future in both private and public sector of business. His book follows that belief by providing convincing history, examples and a rather believable prediction of crowdsourcings’ future.