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Crowdsourcing: A Definition

  • I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

    The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

    The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

Crowdsourcing in the News

  • July 27, 2008: The Washington Post
    While I was on vacation The Post's Jane Black dropped a line to ask me what I thought about crowdsourcing in restaurants. Naturally, I replied that I don't think about crowdsourcing in restaurants. In fact, I'm always asked when crowdsourcing doesn't work, and I've tended to use just such retail examples as this. After all, do you really want the crowd making your tofu chili? This sure shows my lack of imagination. Turns out that a few entrepreneurial restaurateurs are doing just this. Black's piece made A1 in yesterday's paper.
  • March 25, 2007: New York Times and NPR's On the Media
    Another twofer: First, in yesterday's Times Jason Pontin takes a first-hand look at Mechanical Turk, ChaCha.com and Jeff Bezos' notion of "artificial artifical intelligence." His experience is less than satisfactory, and a reminder that not everything should be crowdsourced.

    My favorite NPR show, On the Media, interviews TPM Muckraker's Paul Kiel about the site's recent experiment in crowdsourcing. Muckraker asked its readers to parse the 3,000 emails pertaining to the firing of federal prosecutors that Dept. of Justice released last week. Within hours Muckraker readers were ferreting out compromising passages, some of which led to news leads for MSM pubs, further evidence that the crowd has a promising future in performing investigative functions. Shady politicians (is that phrase redundant?) beware.
  • March 19, 2007: New York Times and Detroit Free Press
    Today's a twofer: The New York Times' David Carr writes about Assignment Zero in his column, "The Media Equation." I edited David a few times at the now defunct Inside.com (It shined brightly but briefly). If memory serves, he could recall obscure circulation figures on certain newspapers and magazines from memory. No mean media critic, in other words. So I was elated to see him give Assignment Zero a cautiously optimistic treatment.

    Crowdsourcing also made the Detroit Free Press today, where religion writer David Crumm writes about how theologians and pastors are using the model to let their congregations "shape a church's worship and programs." I haven't followed the crowdsourcing in religion angle as much as I'd like, and this is a great introduction to the subject.
  • March 16, 2007: Radio: WNYC - Crowdsourcing and Music
    Does user-generated content threaten the recording industry? That presumes there's still a recording industry to speak of. I'm kidding—kinda. But CD sales get more and more anemic and companies building businesses out of unknown bands—call it music by the crowd—look more and more interesting (and viable) all the time. Yesterday I was on one of my favorite WNYC shows, "Soundcheck" discussing all this and more. Stream or download the show here. You can listen to my segment alone (it runs about 20 minutes), but I recommend you listen to the opening segment on the bizarre-but-intriguing midomi.com. Midomi is a social networking site that allows you to search for music by singing a few bars into a microphone connected to your computer. Soundcheck brought in a trained opera singer to put Midomi's software to the test, with humorous results. American Idol-meets-Myspace-meets-iTunes-meets-voice-recognition-software. That's some mash-up. What will those Stanford smarties dream up next?
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December 16, 2008

The Best Application of Crowdsourcing You Didn't Know About

Occasionally—just occasionally—I gloat. Shortly after writing the original Wired article on crowdsourcing, I predicted that the GPS navigation systems like those produced by TomTom and Garmin would eventually put their own customers to work improving their maps. This bit of prognostication didn't make it into my book, but I was happy to discover a TomTom executive attending a workshop on crowdsourcing I gave in Rotterdam a few months ago. Earlier this year the company launched a feature it calls MapShare, in which the TomTom user community collectively acts to provide updates and fixes to the map.

1147640-1476069

Today, a trademag covering the "sat-nav" industry ( a lovely British locution, that) notes that users have now made 5 million corrections. “To put this five million milestone in perspective: a one-hour trip made anywhere in Europe or North America will be influenced by twenty to thirty Map Share corrections,” said Corinne Vigreux, managing director TomTom.

Below, a graph charting growth of the MapShare community vis a vis growth of TomTom's user base generally:

1147640-1476070  

Posted by Jeff P Howe on December 16, 2008 at 08:12 AM in Crowdsourcing Maps |

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Comments

I'd prefer to mention the OpenStreetMap project. Much more sophisticated, because the crowd is not reduced to some users of devices for navigation.
See http://www.openstreetmap.org

Posted by: Marco Lechner | December 16, 2008 at 09:43 AM

The real interesting thing about this move from TomTom is that they "trusted" the crowd to help influence their product while business is going well versus a desperate move to stay alive. I liken this example to Gold Corp who went to crowdsourcing as a last resort and it ended up paying off http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2007/id20070201_774736.htm
However if business was going well for Gold Corp I would guess that they would have been unlikely to turn to crowdsourcing as a foundation for growth.

From a market perspective this would appear to be the furtherance of a trend that crowdsourcing should be the cornerstone of growth for companies versus the last gasp of air. The problem that the world faces is that that companies must first move out of the "cone-of-silence" and trust the crowd to help grow their business.

TheCrowd is gathering......

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Posted by: cynthia | December 26, 2008 at 12:05 AM

navigation systems like those produced by TomTom and Garmin would eventually put their own customers to work improving their

Posted by: cellphone | January 07, 2009 at 11:47 PM

Hi Jeff,

Nice example. We have created a Interactive Flash Animation on crowdsourcing http://vizedu.com/2009/01/crowdsource-your-business/ .

You Blog was a great reference for us and you have been profiled in the video. Just wanted to share that with you.

Awesome work. Will continue to come back and educate myself.
Thanks
Sandeep
www.VizEdu.com

Posted by: Sandeep Arora | January 09, 2009 at 04:58 AM

Jeff, I've read your blog articles with some interest and am really excited about recent crowdsourcing innovations, TomTom certainly being one of them. I've just written a blog piece about parallels between crowdsourcing and the Baha'i administrative system (bet you're like: "huh?!") Check it out!

Posted by: Nadim | January 09, 2009 at 06:07 PM

Jeff, just started reading your book this evening -- on page 20. Pretty dang good so far.

Posted by: Chris Cairns | January 16, 2009 at 09:42 PM

thank you very much ,,

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Posted by: danial | July 11, 2009 at 04:03 AM

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The Rise of Crowdsourcing

  • Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.