What the Hell is...Crowdsourcing?

November 21, 2008 12:00 AM

The concept of crowdsourcing involves using large groups of people, often connected by the Internet, to achieve a task or answer a series of questions. The idea of outsourcing to crowds is that either access to a pool of expertise or the collective response will yield more efficient (dollar-wise and time-wise) and/or accurate results. Author Jeff Howe refers to it as the "application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software," which turns consumers into creators.

In 2005, Amazon introduced the Amazon Mechanical Turk, where users can reach out to a collection of researchers who answer "human intelligence tasks." The idea is that a group of people with predetermined qualifications can perform certain jobs more effectively than computers, whether it is scanning photos or providing shopping recommendations.

The most controversial area of crowdsourcing is likely in the field of citizen journalism, wherein web publishing might be outstripping an editor's ability to monitor what is going out. As the news cycle gets faster, the danger is that journalistic standards could be relaxed because of an assumption that mistakes tend to be discovered and amended quickly. Consider the recent example where a post on CNN's iReport website claimed Steve Jobs was hospitalized for chest pains. Apple's stock plummeted and the company was forced to issue a statement denying the report.

Origin:
Writer Jeff Howe coined the phrase crowdsourcing in a June 2006 article in Wired magazine to discuss how cheap labor was being discovered via the Internet. Howe later wrote the book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, which theorized that we were undergoing a cultural shift that redefined corporate research and the marketing process.

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