Crowdsourcing is a relatively new word – only introduced back in 2006 by Jeff Howe, who defines it as an act of outsourcing the tasks of developing new technology or application to the crowd through an open call. I’ve just finished (speed) reading his book, Crowdsourcing: why the power of the crowds is driving the future of business. I had to do the speed reading as I found the book is unfortunately quite repetitive. Given that it was written in 2008, it didn’t really cover the recent rise of microblogging (Twitter), social networking, and Web 2.0 that powers up crowdsourcing. A video about crowdsourcing is a good spoof on what it really means.
Jeff Howe presented four categories of crowdsourcing: Crowd wisdom, Crowd creation, Crowd voting, and Crowdfunding. I would add two more to the list:
Crowd Democracy.
Although this could be part of crowd voting, but given the many recent online apps that have been used solely to gather and present a community voice to the local, state, or federal governments, this could well be a category of its own. An example of this is Fix My Street, a site to report, view, or discuss local problems (such as graffiti, broken road surface, pothole, or street lighting) built by MySociety, a crowdsourced community who build and run democracy websites in UK. Up to now as I write this, there have been 879 reports in past week, 87,868 updates on reports, and 2,104 reported problems were fixed in past month. Can we have an app like this in Melbourne? Imagine that you can use your twitter or a mobile app to be an online reporter and get your voice heard and get attended to!
Crowd place-making.
Where on earth are the crowds now? Where are the cool places that you should go to right now? Applications such as foursquare has become a popular social-networked place-making applications and has been used widely given that the app for Blackberry and IPhone are available and it is connected to Facebook’s status updates. A similar application to foursquare (which is older, and smarter) is CitySense, where it learns particularly about you and your movement, and can give you suggestions of where people like you are located at the moment.
Jeff Howe’s recent 1b1t (1 book 1 twitter) movement, which I think can be well placed inside the Crowd Wisdom category, is an open call for those on Twitter to read a book and post comment on #1b1t. His article on Wired: What if everyone on Twitter read one book, has at least 6000 clicks as aggregated by bit.ly. The book chosen for 1b1t is American Gods, a novel by Neil Gaiman, to be read by the crowds of 1b1t from 5th May to 30th June. I think by looking at the #1b1t Twitter stream, it looks like there’s a real crowd out there reading American Gods right now.
In Australia, the open calls from the recent Gov Hack competitions, such as Mashup Australia, app4nsw, and App My State VIC, is a great example of how the federal and state government are interested in crowdsourcing a bunch of useful online and mobile applications using public data (provided by both government and private institutions) and Web2.0 technology. Due to these comps, Hack Days are happening all over Australia, where designers, programmers, web developers, marketers, etc have teamed up to create some really interesting apps and ideas.
What makes crowdsourcing works? Why is crowdsourcing becoming more audible than ever? I think in order for crowdsourcing to work – it doesn’t have to provide financial incentives (such as the Gov Hack open calls), but more importantly, it needs to address the needs of individuals of the crowd:
to be heard
to be able to contribute
to express their ideas
to feel belong
to feel significant
Powered with Twitter and other social mediated means, we are seeing a wave of crowdsourced mobile and online applications that are becoming part of our lives, invisible intruders that would be welcomed by the crowds, only if they think they can benefit from these apps and if they think they can contribute back in a meaningful way.
Thumbnail credit: James Cridland on Flickr.
