Crowdsource this

Miss Rogue’s sadness over the misuse of the term crowdsourcing struck a chord with me.

Lately I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with the term myself. The buzzword is just too closely associated with the concept of sourcing labor for my liking.

Jeff Howe responded to Tara’s post,

Why would it make you sad? What examples of crowdsourcing are you referring to? Did you read the article in which we proposed the existence of the phenomenon? I coined the term (with my editor at Wired) back in January to describe the migration of open source models into fields like advertising and science, and have since watched the term become somewhat misunderstood.

Perhaps the concept would have been better protected from buzzword abuse had it derived its wording from open source concepts like community, gift economies and social production. Instead the words etymology is associated with loaded emotional concepts such as offshoring and outsourcing.

I doubt the team at Flickr had strategy sessions about “Using crowdsourcing to build the largest database of tagged photographs”. When Jimmy Wales talks about Wikipedia, he doesn’t talk about crowdsourcing the costly parts of assembling reference material.

Language shapes behavior and culture. Some companies associate themselves with the buzzwords and miss the power of the idea. Companies that hang their corporate language to popular buzzwords often find themselves fighting to be relevant as the buzzword fades. Not unlike Web 2.0.

Tim O’Reilly can’t stop the thousands of clueless entrepreneurs and executives chasing the Web 2.0 buzzword, but the term is diluted nonetheless. For some Web 2.0 is an easy buzzword since you only have to remember to switch one digit from your Web 1.0 idea to be in business, ready for the next web boom. A suprising number of people using the term have never heard of the architecture of participation and think folksonomies are an economic system involving folk songs.

I don’t have a better word, and like Web 2.0 - crowdsourcing is a popular meme that refers to a fascinating trend.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Tara may be the canary in the coal mine on this one. My advice is to really listen to the context and words used by anyone touting themselves as a ‘crowdsourcing’ company. If you don’t hear phrases like freedom, community, empowering users, responsibilities owed to the community then they probably don’t get the full power of the idea.

Their loss.

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On Wed 25 Oct 2006.

8 Responses to “ Crowdsource this ”

Comments:

Tara Hunt says:
October 25th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Awesome post, Austin,

You captured it better than I could have ever.

I think Jeff is also seeing the light…hopefully he will start publishing stories about what crowdsourcing IS NOT. #1 - it is not anything that uses the word crowdsourcing as the justification.

Man, I liked it better when it was the subtle, organic gift economy…when business was scratching its head, wondering why the heck all of these people would donate their time, money and effort to things. I liked it better when they wrote us off as crazy.

austin says:
October 25th, 2006 at 2:07 pm

Thanks for the comment & visit Tara.

Love what you, Chris and the team at CA are doing. The good thing about all the buzzword noise - is that it becomes very easy to hide in plainsight. You can have authentic conversations without any fear of someone ‘competing’ with your idea - because by and large most people are too caught up with the buzzwords to invest in the time in listening & learning from their users.

Hope to see you at Web 2.0 in SF. It will be good to meet a fellow Calgarian having fun in the valley

Hugh says:
October 26th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

Apart from the unfortunate outsourcing connotation, crowdsouring completely misses this point (which is something I have thought a lot about at LibriVox):

that what goes *in* is more important than what comes *out*.

crowdsourcing sounds like it is about extracting resources from a crowd (like a strip mine, exploiting resources)… when in fact the real power (and beauty) is in creating a community that wants to contribute *into* something.

crowdsourcing = clearcut
???? = community gardening

i don’t know what the ???? is (and frankly don’t care). but if you look at successful ???? projects, I think you will find common elements that crowdsourcing doesn’t catch:

a) people want to contribute to the public sphere (with idealist motivations)
b) participating in the project becomes a highly social, almost family-like activity

in short, the opposite of crowd, and the opposite of sourcing.

apparently this guy has written about this stuff, but I have not read him:
http://www.benkler.org/

(he calls is commons-based peer production)

maybe: scatteredbuilding …nah. buzzwords suck.

Kempton says:
December 5th, 2006 at 5:41 am

Hello Austin,

I was going to comment on your Dec 4th and 5th posts originally. Now, hours and many other posts later, I am linked back to this post and finally understand what you really meant in this post.

Here are my top three reasons of why it took me so long to understand this post:
3) Oh man, the birds in the above pictures were way too distracting (smile)
2) I think I need to read all the other posts first (which I didn’t) to get this one.
1) I think our lunch chat, especially when we talked about your view of “community production” vs “crowdsourcing”, really helped set some of the ideas straight.

Cheers,
Kempton

P.S. Now, I am going to work backwards to the other posts to read and comment on them.

Billions With Zero Knowledge

8 Responses to “ Crowdsource this ”

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