More about Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing enables you to attract many talented and experienced people to contribute ideas and knowledge, or provide services to you in order to achieve goals not possible by yourself or with a fixed staff. Moreover, you can attract many people to contribute resources such as capital, on line promotional channel, or software that you can not obtain from larger but limited number of contributors.

One major form of peer collaboration is Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing isn’t a new concept, but the way it is now being applied online is relatively new, far more powerful and typically global.



Crowdsourcing can work, but to be successful you need to:

Pick the right model – There are some basic crowdsourcing models that you could use based on your objective, but note that successful crowdsourcing projects often use a combination of these approaches and each model should be fine-tuned to particular situation.

• Crowd Wisdom, or Collective Intelligence: based on the principle that the groups contain more knowledge than individuals, that is the crowd is smarter than the smartest individual in the crowd. This knowledge can be leveraged in solving problems, making accurate predictions or ranking. E.g. scientific or technical discoveries and forecasting.

Watch this brief interview from James Surowiecki, author of "Wisdom of Crowds"

• Crowd Creation: based on the principle that the crowd possesses a great deal of creative energy and expertise that can be leveraged in artistic, literary and scientific/technical productions. E.g. building knowledge base, producing commercials and S/W development.
• Crowd Promotion: based on collective channels, allowing a large number of people to participate in promotional and advertising initiatives. E.g. affiliate programs and sponsorships.
• Crowd Funding: based on the collective pocketbook, allowing large groups of people to replace banks and other institutions as a sources of funds. E.G. buying shares in a musical production.

Pick the Right Crowd – this is closely related to your objective and picking the right crowdsourcing model. Successful crowdsourcing requires creating the right conditions under which crowd will contribute.

• The general conditions for a crowd to be wise are: Diversity of opinion (diverse group of people who often possess unique knowledge), Independence (however, having members interact, can sometimes be good), Decentralized (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge) and Aggregation (some mechanism exist for turning private judgements into collective decision).
• In general, the bigger the crowd, the better. However, while big groups are difficult to manage and can be inefficient. On the other hand, small groups are easy to run, but they risk having too little diversity of thought and too much consensus.

Offer the Right Incentive – Attracting a crowd is much easier than keeping them and getting the crowd to participate is challenging and generally, the most important component of a successful crowdsourcing is a vibrant, committed community. Here are some points to consider:

• People need to feel rewarded for their efforts. Understand what motivates the crowd to contribute to your project (e.g. personal glory, interaction with like minded peers, recognition, improve skills, learn something new, cash, …..).
• Generally, crowdsourcing works best when you satisfy some psychological, social, or emotional need (the uppermost tier on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).
• In some cases, cash works better. People might freely donate knowledge and labor to a nonprofit, but if you are planning to use crowdsourcing to make money, consider some form of revenue sharing with your contributors.

Understand the Benefits and Costs – Crowdsourcing can be expensive (planning, promoting, evaluating and aggregating the results). It can cost more than paying an employee to do a job, but it can lead to superior outcome.

Guide Them – Crowd need direction and guidance no matter how capable and enthusiastic they might be. Successful crowdsourcing need leader(s) who can be you or people selected from the crowd.

Keep it Simple & Break it Down – Allow for different amount of contribution based on individual’s time and keep the nature of the tasks simple to make it easy and appealing. While creative capacity and judgment are universally distributed in a population, available time and attention are not and any crowdsourcing task worth doing is worth dividing up into its smallest possible components.

Remember the 90/10 Percent Rule - Most of the crowdsourcing submissions fail to meet a desired standard of quality and generally over 90% of results are crap. If you find yourself inundated with submissions, use the crowd to find the best and brightest diamonds in the rough.

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