A gathering of friends or complete strangers go to a web site to vote on a favorite topic; a different group of people respond to a request for software development on an existing technology; another group is asked to participate in screening new products from a manufacturer. These are all examples of "crowdsourcing."The word has only been around since 2006, invented by the writer Jeff Howe at Wired magazine. The phenomenon of disparate groups of people gathering to conquer technical issues has been celebrated as an example of the positive results that can come from crowdsourcing. Other businesses have turned it into a marketing model that functions both as a testing mechanism for product decisions, and as a living feedback forum on company direction.
But the claims for crowdsourcing as being a means to defeat any tough goal has become a dilemma because it seems to promise more than it can deliver. Does a group always produce a superior idea? Is a 'crowdsourced' group effort limited by its root in reaction to input, versus the creation of an original idea/solution?
A september 29, 2009 article at forbes.com by Dan Woods attacks the flaws that he sees inside the hype:
There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.
What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution.
Just look at the successes of crowdsourcing to see how the crowd is an illusion.
Wikipedia seems like a good example of a crowd of people who have created a great resource. But at a conference last year I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about how articles were created. He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated--corrected, improved and extended--by many different people. Some articles are indeed group creations that evolved out of a sentence or two. But if you took away all of the articles that were individual creations, Wikipedia would have very little left.
(Source tip: Local Motors marketer Ariel Ferreira.)
'Crowdsourcing' is a loose term that can be applied to perfectly simple online tools used by any number of web sites: polling software, interactive-survey forms, voting tools. It is in the idea that there is a generation of original ideas that the Woods' article makes a counter-claim. He defines the issue of leadership from individual initiative (and ability) and then the reaction of a larger group that follows in the predetermined pathway, polishing the existing "idea."
Divorced from those concerns of action and reaction, 'crowdsourcing' is an elastic popular term. Web sites can use this loose application as a way to install a better interaction with a customer base, and group it under the rubric of the present fashion for 'crowdsourcing.' In that sense, 'crowdsourcing' is a marketing term, not a problem-solving methodology.
