crowdsourcing – intro.
Here it comes – the requisite position statement and analysis of crowdsourcing. It’s a little late – I didn’t ride that trend wave back when the scandal over the paying of select members of the crowd to do their thing broke. I was inspired by an article in “strategy + business” that talks about the parallel topic of crowds and open source software.
The Ignorance of Crowds looks at open source crowdsourcing through the lens of Eric Raymond’s paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” written ten years ago. I hesitate to summarize his whole discussion in a few words (it’s really quite lengthy), but I’ll try to paint the picture:
Great projects start at a single origin. A small oligarchy of contributors pushes it beyond conception into creation. The crowd lends the volume of eyes and fingers to detect and fix bugs. The oligarchy filters and accepts submissions.
In that description, the crowd has its place: the army of worker bees that seeks out and fixes bugs. It’s that kind of leg work that a single developer or group of developers can’t match. However, point the crowd at the task of creating software from scratch or keeping a project moving forward, and it will quickly disintegrate into a “too many cooks” scenario. For those tasks, you need greater control from fewer people.
There are two ways that I think this applies beyond software development: digg and nextNY. (I’ll make two additional posts for those in short order.)