Crowd-sourcing: People solving their (and others) problems

The benefits of collaboration are clear, but the reason for collaboration is the elusive answer. Used in the right way, collaboration and crowdsourcing is an incredible tool, but how and why is it used correctly, and what happens when it is not.

Why Collaborate? In the business world today, it is harder than ever to get proper R+D budgets. The consumer, and even other businesses are looking for an incredible product at no cost. As many business that need semi-custom software have found out, there are 2 choices: go big or go open source. The same theory applies to individuals, I am not about to write a piece of software for editing a photo when there is already a perfectly good free alternative online. The reason for collaboration is simply to accomplish something that cannot be done by one person. Without Edison and the team of people working for the local power company, no person could reliably generate power to light a house. This is illustrated in Howard Rheingold's talking about prehistoric humans, they grew beyond fending for themselves and produced something much more. Abundance. Abundance of Photographs on stock photo sites. Abundance of gathered knowledge at Wikipedia.

How is collaboration used correctly? As Howard Rheingold pointed out, the key to getting everyone on the same project comes in creating an Assurance Game. Wikipedia, Digg, and all of the other examples discussed by the Rise of Crowdsourcing article, including InnoCentive and SETI@Home. Each of these gives the user reward for participating without the possibility of harmful malice.

What happens when crowdsourcing goes wrong? Researching for this post, I signed up for the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service. Although praised for it's ability to use a diverse group of workers, I found that many of the decently paid services were either directly scams or testing scamming websites. This was very disappointing, and an example of doing it wrong. Amazon did not incorporate the Assurance required in the sellers of the service.

The situation in Egypt is an example, not of online crowdsourcing, but simply a communication medium being used for the better. The element of crowdsourcing that is not talked about in the article, is actually the reporting and information collection about the incident from the inside. This conflict may be one of the best documented in history because of the wealth of information posted by the Egyptians.