Crowdsourcing Application

Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired Magazine, coined the term "crowdsourcing" in 2005 after conversations about how businesses were using the Internet to outsource work to individuals. Howe first published a definition for the term "crowdsourcing" in a companion blog post to his June 2006 Wired magazine article, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," which came out in print just days later:

"Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers."

Despite the multiple definitions of crowdsourcing, one constant has been the broadcasting of problems to the public, and an open call for contributions to solving the problem. Members of the public submit solutions which are then owned by the entity which broadcast the problem.

Crowdsourcing is one of the best ways to see the ideas and creativity of public. Companies use this method to meet the public demand, as well.It also gives the crowd the feeling of ownership that is given to them by the company who is doing outsourcing.

• Wikipedia- Instead of Wikipedia creating an encyclopedia on their own, hiring writers and editors, they gave a crowd the ability to create the information on their own. The result? The most comprehensive encyclopedia this world has ever seen.

• Coca-Cola- Well-known for keeping secret the formula of its most famous beverage, Coke now uses a more open business model, assuming an increasingly prominent position in corporate crowdsourcing. Its open-sourced “Shaping a Better Future” challenge asks entrepreneurs to create improvement-ventures for the project-hubs of youth employment, education, environment and health. In addition, its “Where Will Happiness Strike Next?” series of short films and TV-commercials relies on the social media-input of Coke customers, contributing ideas about creating happiness. Coke also seeks crowdsourced online suggestions for marketing its products more effectively, once again tying social media to co-creation.

• Oreo- Oreo has made somewhat of a name for itself in crowdsourcing for its “Daily Twist” campaign. In honor of its 100th anniversary, the brand launched a 100-day series of cookie designs. It asked the public to select the winning design. There was a lot of promotion going on during the campaign, via paid, earned and owned media. Oreo’s Facebook page sharing increased more than 4,000 percent during the campaign, when compared to other months.

• Facebook- has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.

• LEGO- Design byME was a service connected with the construction toy Lego. Launched in 2005 under the name Lego Factory, the service allowed people to design their own Lego models using a computer program, then upload them to the Lego website, design their own box design, and order them for actual delivery. The brand also covers a small selection of products that have been designed by Lego fans, and which were available to purchase as a set.

• iStockphoto- iStockphoto grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers. How? By creating a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers – homemakers, students, engineers, dancers. There are now about 22,000 contributors to the site, which charges between $1 and $5 per basic image.

• P&G- Seeing that the company’s most successful products were a result of collaboration between different divisions, P&G had set a goal of increasing the number of innovations acquired from outside its walls from 15 percent to 50 percent. Six years later, critical components of more than 35 percent of the company’s initiatives were generated outside P&G. Larry Huston: “We have 9,000 people on our R&D staff and up to 1.5 million researchers working through our external networks. The line between the two is hard to draw.”

Theoretical Perspectives:

One concept proposed to be important for the development of the crowdsourcing process is the evolution of the dispersed knowledge into set of meaningful resources (organizational resources). The step which enables this change is said to be “crowd capability”.

• Crowd Capability- Crowd capability contains three elements: structure, content and process.

Structure represents the whole environment that allows the improvement of the content owned by the contributors into being an organizational resource. Then the crowd capital is created, via an organizational process.

An IT structure can be episodic (reCAPTCHA and Foldit) or collaborative (enterprise wikis). In an episodic one contributors don’t co-work or don’t interact with each other via Internet, whereas in collaborative one participants must communicate through IT to generate the resources to be gathered from crowds.

Modern Methods:

People generally use Internet as structure, where they avoid facing a possible scrutiny and bias towards their work or physical judgement. They feel more comfortable and more willing to participate in web-based projects.

Crowdsourcing can either take an explicit or an implicit route. Explicit crowdsourcing lets users work together to evaluate, share and build different specific tasks, while implicit crowdsourcing means that users solve a problem as a side effect of something else they are doing.

Resources:

• wired.com
• wikipedia
• Lego DesignMe
• Digiday
• crowdsourcing.org