Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design^[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

History

The word was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article.^[2] Projects which make use of group intelligence such as the LazyWeb predate that word coinage by several years^{[citation needed]}. Recently, the Internet has been used to publicize and manage crowdsourcing projects.

Overview

The crowdsourcing process in eight steps.

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.^[3]

Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include:

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly.
• Payment is by results or even omitted (See Twinpage of the German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing).
• The organization can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organization.^[4]
• By listening to the crowd, organizations gain first-hand insight on customer desires.
• The community may feel a brand-building kinship with the crowdsourcing organization, which is result of an earned sense of ownership through contribution and collaboration.

The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis.^[5] Other differences between open source and crowdsourced production relate to the motivations of individuals to participate.^[5][6]

Crowdsourcing also has potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use.^[5] Urban and transit planning are prime areas for crowdsourcing,^[7] with a project to test crowdsourcing the public participation process for transit planning in Salt Lake City underway in 2008-2009 funded by a U.S. Federal Transit Administration grant.^[8] Another notable application of crowdsourcing to government problem solving is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.^[9]

Early examples

The Internettunnel in Leidschendam/Netherlands by Zwarts & Jansma Architects and artist Hans Muller is an early example of crowdsourcing. Opened in 1998, people could feed the LED-display via internet with their own texts. Also, words could be blocked for a certain time. The public became its own dynamic filter, preventing for example racist remarks.

Recent examples

• uTest Bug Battle, is a quarterly software testing competition, where thousands of software testers from around the world compete to find bugs in today's most popular web, mobile, desktop and gaming applications.The company's first Bug Battle occurred in November 2008; the 1,331 software testers who participated found more than 700 bugs in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The second Bug Battle took place in March 2009; the 1,119 software testers who participated found bugs in Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Twitter applications were the subject of the third Bug Battle in June 2009 and nearly $4,000 in prize money was awarded to those reporting best bugs and best feedback. uTest’s business model is based on the idea that crowdsourcing is better suited to web and mobile app testing than other outsourcing models. With crowdsourced testing, the crowd reflects the diversity (e.g. multiple geographic locations, languages spoken) of the apps and users themselves.

• Netflix Prize, is an ongoing open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition is held by Netflix, an online DVD-rental service, and is opened for anyone (with some exceptions). The grand prize of $1,000,000 is reserved for the entry which bests Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%. Netflix provided a training data set of over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies, which is one of the largest real real-life data sets available for research. The related forum maintained by Netflix has seen lively discussions and contributed a lot to the success of this competition. A very relevant fact to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams are not only academic researchers, but laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering (virtually learning the problem space from scratch).

• Dolores Labs provides a crowdsourcing service that enables businesses to process high volumes of simple tasks that are difficult to automate. DL has various sources of people who participate in processing the work including Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The company's key innovation and contribution to the emerging crowdsourcing practice is in the realm of quality standards using statistical and related technical algorithms and methods.

• Galaxy Zoo, a citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The project has led to numerous scientific papers and citizen scientist-led discoveries such as Hanny's Voorwerp.

• Smartsheet is an online software service and consultancy that enables businesses to track and manage work through online sharing and crowdsourcing methods. The company's Smartsourcing^[10] service enables people to anonymously submit and manage all phases of crowdsourced work processing. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is one of the work exchange platforms with which Smartsheet is integrated.

• The Guardian's investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in the United Kingdom. The newspaper created a system to allow the public to search methodically through 700,000 expense claim documents. Over 20,000 people participated in finding erroneous and remarkable expense claims by Members of Parliament.^[11]

• FamilySearch Indexing, is a volunteer project which aims to create searchable digital indexes for scanned images of historical documents. The documents are drawn primarily from a collection of 2.4 million microfilms made of historical documents from 110 countries and principalities. Volunteers install free software on their home computers, download images from the site, type the data they read from the image into the software, and submit their work back to the site. The data is eventually made publicly and freely available at Family History Centers on one of the FamilySearch web sites for use in genealogical research. Over 250 million historical records have been transcribed to date.

• InnoCentive, started in 2002, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive provides connection and relationship management services between "Seekers" and "Solvers." Seekers are the companies searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 125,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone with interest and Internet access can become an InnoCentive Solver. Solvers whose solutions are selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive, which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to target solutions from InnoCentive's Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social initiatives.^[12]

• Philoptima, started in 2008, crowdsources research and development on social causes among philanthropists and grant makers. Philoptima provides connection and relationship management services between "Prize Makers" and "Faculty." Prize Makers are the philanthropists and grant makers searching for solutions to critical social challenges. The underlying use of open innovation philanthropy as a universal theory of practice is gaining national and international recognition as a successful way to emply mass collaboration. The Philoptima faculty are the hundreds of registered Philoptima researchers, experts, and specialists who provide their solutions to the prize makers and philanthropists in response to problems posted by prizemakers along with an attendant cash prize and deadline. Anyone who is smart and intuitive can become a member of the Philoptima faculty. Members whose solutions are selected by the grant makers and philanthropists are compensated for their ideas by Philoptima, which acts as manager of the problem>solution>prize process.^[13]

• DesignBay, a crowdsourcing marketplace for graphic design and creative services, launched in February 2008 and helped run a contest for global footwear company HI-TEC. HI-TEC "estimated that using DesignBay.com [and crowdsourcing] for the project saved HI-TEC up to half the costs of going down the usual design route" ^[14]

• 99designs, the first marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design spun out of SitePoint.com in February 2008 and connects clients in need of design work such as logos, business cards, websites and other graphical elements to a community of graphic designers. Designers from all over the world compete for design projects listed on the site.^[15]

• Prova Advertising is the first company to leverage the power of crowdsourcing solely to provide businesses with high quality advertising and marketing materials. Prova.fm helps business clients host their own contest for the best design of advertising materials such as direct mail postcards, door hangers, logos, audio and video spots with designers submitting entries from all over the world.

• Emporis, a provider of building data, has run the Emporis Community (a website where members can submit building information) since May 2000. Today, more than 1,000 members contribute building data throughout the world.

• The ESP Game by Luis von Ahn (later acquired by Google and renamed Google Image Labeler) was launched in 2004 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. This game led to the concept of Games with a purpose.

• reCAPTCHA is used for digitizing old texts, by providing the text (that can't be deciphered properly by OCR software) to be read by end users of a CAPTCHA spam filter. reCAPTCHA is helping to digitize over 30 million words per day from the Internet Archive and the New York Times archive. Over 200 million people have helped digitize at least one word using this system.^[16]

• Since 2004, MoveOn.org has applied crowdsourcing to a variety of challenges related to organizing a political movement including phonebanking, field organizing via house parties, and the creation of ads against opponents.

• Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) mid 2008 launched a crowdsourcing initiative named Doeners.net, meant for people to support the organization's campaigning activities.

• The Katrina PeopleFinder Project used crowdsourcing to collect data for lost persons. Over 4,000 people donated their time after Hurricane Katrina. It included 90,000 entries.

• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing "machine".

• Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer "clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.

• Innovation Exchange is an open innovation vendor which emphasizes community diversity; it sources solutions to business problems from both experts and novices. Companies sponsor challenges which are responded to by individuals, people working in ad hoc teams, or by small and midsize businesses. In contrast to sites focused primarily on innovation in the physical sciences, Innovation Exchange fosters product, service, process, and business model innovation.

• The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they choose — whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc.^[17][18]

• The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data on its Red Lake, Ontario, property available to the public over the Internet. They offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, over 80% of which proved productive; yielding 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion. The prize was won by a small consultancy in Perth, Western Australia, called Fractal Graphics.

• In January 2008, the State of Texas announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border, to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents.^[19]

• Wikipedia is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing,^[20] despite objections by co-founder Jimmy Wales to the term.^[21]

• The search for aviator Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe that was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful.^[22][23] Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means^[24].

• Cisco Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 was a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother, Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won US$250,000.^[25][26]

• Foldit invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies.

• Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a Web-based project launched by Project Gutenberg that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors.

• OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the world, which has over 100,000 signed up contributors in mid 2009. Creation and maintenance of geospatial data is a labor intensive task which is expensive using traditional approaches, and crowdsourcing is also being used by commercial companies in this area including Google and TomTom.

• The Open Dinosaur Project is a community research project to aggregate published measurements of ornithischian dinosaur limb bones for many different taxa in order to study the multiple evolutionary transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in this group of dinosaurs. The measurements gathered by the community participants will be analyzed by the project leaders and results will be published in an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal. All contributors will be listed as co-authors on the eventual publication.

• Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and have turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack food brand Peperami since 1993, but have decided to submit their brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives. ^[27]

Controversy

The ethical, social, and economic implications of crowdsourcing are subject to wide debate. For example, author and media critic Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview published in Wired News, expressed ambivalence about the term and its implications.^[28] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is also a vocal critic of the term.^[29]

Some reports have focused on the negative effects of crowdsourcing on business owners, particularly in regard to how a crowdsourced project can sometimes end up costing a business more than a traditionally outsourced project.

Some possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing include:

• Added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion.
• Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project.
• Below-market wages.^[30], or no wages at all. Barter agreements are often associated with crowdsourcing.
• No written contracts, nondisclosure agreements, or employee agreements or agreeable terms with crowdsourced employees.
• Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers throughout the duration of a project.
• Susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts.

Though some critics believe crowdsourcing exploits or abuses individuals for their labor, studies into the motivations of crowds have not yet shown that crowds feel exploited. On the contrary, many individuals in the crowd experience significant benefits from their participation in crowdsourcing applications.^{[31][32][33][34]}

Historical examples

• The Alkali Prize
• The Longitude Prize
• Fourneyron's Turbine
• Montyon Prizes
• Nicolas Appert and food preservation
• Loebner Prize
• Millennium Prize Problems

See also

• Buzzwords
• Citizen science
• Clickworkers
• Co-creation
• Collective intelligence
• Collaborative innovation network
• Configuration system
• Crowdcasting
• Crowd funding
• Distributed Computing
• Distributed thinking
• Human Computation
• The Long Tail
• Mass Collaboration
• Mass Customization
• Micro-revenue
• Open Innovation
• Social collaboration
• Social commerce
• Toolkits for User Innovation
• Tuangou
• Virtual volunteering
• Wikinomics
• Wisdom of Crowds
• Urtak

Notes

References

• Noveck, Beth Simone. (2009). Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. 10-ISBN 0-815-70275-2; 13-ISBN 978-0-815-70275-7

External links

• The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused), by Steve Lohr, "The New York Times", July 18, 2009.
• Prova - A New Graphics Business Service Every Entrepreneur Should Know About, Women In Business, October 10, 2009
• Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons It's Not Just For Startups Any More, by Dion Hinchcliffe, "www.ebizQ.com", September 25, 2009.
• Crowdsourcing Pioneer: Doron Reuveni, by Andrew Muns, "Software Testing & Performance Magazine", September 1, 2009.
• Crowdsourcing: What It Means for Innovation, by John Winsor, "Business Week", June 15, 2009.
• Crowdsourcing: Now With a Real Business Model!, by Jeff Howe, "Wired Magazine", December 2, 2008.
• Contribute ideas to improve public services in the UK
• Internettunnel Leidschendam, Zwarts & Jansma Architects
• Crowdsourcing: A People Business - An article discussing concepts from Jeff Howe's book Crowdsourcing from The Economist print edition, September 25, 2008.
• Crowdsourcing: tracking the rise of the amateur - crowdsourcing blog by Jeff Howe
• Crowdsourcing craze hits pet ID tags - Crowdsourcing pet ID tags
• Moving the Crowd at iStockphoto: The Composition of the Crowd and Motivations for Participation in a Crowdsourcing Application, by Daren C. Brabham, First Monday, June 2, 2008.
• Crowdsourcing: consumers as creators, by Paul Boutin, Business Week, July 13, 2006.
• Secure Distributed Human Computation by Craig Gentry, Zulfikar Ramzan, and Stuart Stubblebine. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2005.
• Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Business Week, February 1, 2007.
• Randy Burge: Internet allows us to resource the crowd, Albuquerque Tribune, April 9, 2007.
• Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness: Citizendium, by Michael Ho for Assignment Zero and Wired, May 3, 2007.
• InnoCentive: Crowdsourcing Diversity: What starts with the crowd ends in research and development, Randy Burge interviews Alph Bingham, cofounder of InnoCentive, for Assignment Zero and Wired (magazine), May 18, 2007.
• The Hopkinson Report, Episode 19 - interview with Jeff Howe on his book Crowdsourcing
• DoNanza: Crowdsourcing and freelance jobs search engine
• Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment from Nieman Journalism Lab
• Unilever goes crowdsourcing to spice up Peperami's TV ads , By Mark Sweeney, The Guardian, August 25, 2009.