Who, what, where, when – Crowd sourcing: a presentation
Posted by Sandra Cosser on 23 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Presentations
Crowd sourcing is a fascinating phenomenom that draws on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to solve problems, find inspiration, gather information and tap into the knowledge of a select public to further company aims. It’s used quite a lot; sometimes it’s successful and sometimes it’s not. The most successful example is probably Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt making company that creates only designs submitted by their audience. Very simply, anyone can submit a t-shirt design, anyone can vote on designs submitted and the designs with the highest number of votes makes it to the manufacturing process – provided they get sufficient pre-orders, which goes to show that the owners of Threadless are pretty smart people.
University research projects also make use of crowd sourcing, as do journalists and increasingly, online marketing specialists, particularly when it comes to brand promotion and the creation of brand evangelists. But as a concept, crowd sourcing is not fool-proof, in fact, one could argue that it favours fools. Group think poses a rather serious problem. Group think requires conformity, often at the cost of invention and advancement. Aside from uninspired crowds, another problem is crowds that are too adventurous, and that want something very new and very fun and not at all practical or viable on a business front.
Crowds are volatile and the instinct it to try and control them, but when engaging in crowd sourcing projects, that is precisely what you cannot do. If you try and control your crowd, it will revolt and you’ll be in a world of trouble. The trick is to choose your crowd very carefully, target the right audience and then let them assume responsibility for whatever it is that you want them to do. Provide subtle guidance if you deem it necessary but do not interfere in the natural crowd sourcing process – cage the control freak within and learn to trust.
The presentation below outlines crowd sourcing as a concept and explores some methods of best practice; it’s not definitive, so feel free to add your two cents to the comments. In crowd sourcing, (nearly) all information is welcome.
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 pm
This was a very interesting read. I love the slideshow, very informative and more engaging than reading reams and reams.
I found the concept of crowd sourcing interesting and would like to know how big the crowd would have to be for a situation to be classed as ‘crowd sourcing’.
Regards,
Karl
March 27th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Thanks for the positive feedback, it’s always good for the old ego.
I think that the concept of a ‘crowd’ is too vague for it to be defined in terms of numbers. According to age old wisdom, three is a crowd, but would you use the collective wisdom of three people to launch a new product, research your target market or investigate the origins of life?
Probably not. I reckon it depends on your needs. In the Threadless example, the company needs to have a reasonable collection of new designs to present to the public – uploading only one or two for review would be pointless. Only a handful of votes would be equally useless. So, they would need a crowd of substantial size, I would guess that hundreds of people would need to participate to make it worthwhile, but they may feel that anything around 50 is sufficient.
It also depends on the type of crowd that you’re trying to source. A small group of engineering experts (lets say 5) may be more productive than a large group (say 20) if you’re asking for a solution to a specific problem, because any more could result in endless debate, bickering and repetitive cycling of ideas with little progress.
But in truth, I’m just guessing here. I would be interested to know if anyone else has any information that could settle the issue – or simply add fuel to the fire