When a motivated or obsessed individual starts doing something and attracts a group of similarly minded people who are not as motivated, the results can be great. But is it crowdsourcing? To me it seems to just be collaboration.
I tend to agree with Dan Woods that crowdsourcing is more a few motivated individuals who attract a group of people to themselves. For websites like iStockphoto.com, it's about individual people with a camera capable of taking stock-quality photos selling those photos for a little extra money. Just because the website gets submissions from a lot of people doesn't mean it's a leader of crowdsourcing. Yes, it uses a large crowd to generate revenue, but that crowd is composed of individuals who are not interested in providing large numbers of cheap stock photos to people: they're interested in earning a few extra bucks to benefit themselves.
I also have seen instances of Dan Wood's theory of there being only a couple of motivated individuals doing the majority of the work. This really isn't true to the idea of crowdsourcing.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading these articles it seems that the term "crowdsourcing" is just a sexy term that people use to glorify what is actually collaboration.
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