Why Not Crowdsource Your Problems?

Writing for Wired Magazine in 2006, Jeff Howe stumbled upon the concept of "crowdsourcing"

He was writing about the birth of online photo stocks and was trying to describe the situation in which professional photographers who were selling stock photographs for hundreds or thousands of dollars had to compete against amateurs and hobbyists who would sell their images for just a dollar. This was a new form of media sharing that was to take the internet by storm, now companies and publications can purchase endless amounts of top quality images at dirt cheap prices because some student had a fancy camera, photoshop and an internet connection. In essence, crowdsourcing brought information from the masses to the masses.

Howe ended up publishing a book on the subject in 2008 and the concept has begun to manifest all across the web. Howe defines it as "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people".

Many would agree that most of today's internet users are uniformed an opinionated which is fine for solving some problems but there are increasing numbers of places to find like minded individuals on a global scale which is good for the specific problems some people have.

Crowdsourcing, to some degree, is in place in many different parts of the web, from comments on a YouTube video to complaints forums on a broadcasting network site. But it is currently taking off in a variety of new websites, one online traffic database allows users, using GPS enabled smartphones to update on information about traffic. Users can notify others of an accident, road works or speed trap as well as slow moving traffic, but just by having the app turned on it gives real time GPS data as to the movement of the user, if they move quickly, the traffic is light. This creates a overview of traffic in areas where there are numerous users.

Some companies are successfully using crowdsourcing to develop products, similar to the standard focus group method but with access to a much larger audience. Customer feedback and complaints can be aggregated to steer the course of the advancement of products. One website has developed a strategy for monetising crowdsourcing. Users submit an idea for a product, they receive the input of thousands of other users and the product gets developed, the company can then produce the product and sell it through the website while passing most of the profits to the original designer and a proportionate amount to the contributing users. By doing this they offer a financial incentive to taking part in crowdsourcing, and money always makes things more interesting.

by: Tom Doerr

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