Crowdsourcing - Part 1 (Background)

(This is part 1 of the notes to my presentation on crowdsourcing for my iSchool class, INFX 598.)

Crowdsourcing is producing results by harnessing the efforts of a large number of people, usually members of the public, and usually using Internet technology. With crowdsourcing, large jobs are cut down to size so that many people working together can achieve more than a single person could do alone.

Effective crowdsourcing doesn’t happen by accident, and it generally doesn’t arise organically. The key to effective crowdsourcing is in engineering the means of collecting, funneling, orchestrating, and processing a collective input into a useful output. Usually those who use crowdsourcing apply expertise to break a large job up intelligently, and then build a system that many people can use easily to provide a part of the answer, as well as a system to interpret, collate, or otherwise construct the desired larger project or result out of all the small parts.

One of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing may be The Oxford English Dictionary. In July 1857 a circular was issued by the ‘Unregistered Words Committee’ of the Philological Society of London. This circular, which was reprinted in various journals, asked for volunteers to read particular books and copy out quotations illustrating ‘unregistered’ words and meanings—items not recorded in other dictionaries—that could be included in a proposed dictionary supplement. Quotations began to pour in from volunteers, and in January 1858 the Philological Society decided that, instead, efforts should be directed toward compiling a completely new dictionary Renewed appeals to the public followed later that year, culminating in a formal ‘Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary’. The OED still releases “Appeals” to the public to solicit dictionary input on current word usage.

Modern crowdsourcing takes many forms, and new forms are being devised every day – as I researched this presentation, I kept finding new topics to include! So this presentation is not comprehensive by any means, but I hope it will give you an idea of some of the ways the crowdsourcing model is being used.

Before moving ahead, though, I’d like to clarify a few terms that will help me discuss crowdsourcing. First, many people apply the term “crowdsourcing” to projects that offer prizes or other incentives to the public for solving a specific problem. One early example is the cash prize offered by the French military in 1795 for a new method to preserve food, which spurred Nicolas Appert to invent modern canning techniques. A modern version is the Ansari X Prize, which was offered to induce a non-government organization to develop a reusable commercially-viable manned spacecraft. In the strictest sense, however, this is not so much crowdsourcing as what Karim R. Lakhani of Harvard Business School calls “broadcast search”: soliciting a solution from an as-yet unknown individual by widely publicizing a motivational reward. It’s asking a broad audience for a solution, but not using the collective power of many individuals to produce that solution.

I’d also like to define “explicit” and “implicit” crowdsourcing. Explicit crowdsourcing describes projects where people knowingly and actively participate in a project, while implicit crowdsourcing harnesses users who are doing a different activity and don’t necessarily know what work they may be doing for third parties who need information they provide. Examples of each of these will be coming up.

I’ve coined two terms to describe types of crowdsourced project, “mosaic” and “encyclopedia” types. In a mosaic-type project, participants do small tasks that aren’t very useful one by one, but that can be patched together into a cohesive large work. In an encyclopedia-type project, participants contribute small pieces of work that may be useful on their own, but are combined into a larger work that resembles an anthology or an encyclopedia. Again, examples will be upcoming.

Finally, for future reference, I’ll be publishing my notes for this presentation as a series of blog posts on my blog, Fish Who Answer the Telephone. (As you can now see if you're reading this!)  I’ve also collected links to all the projects I discuss in a Tumblr, and I’ve started a Scoop.It page with more articles about crowdsourcing, if you want to read even more about it. 

(Next: research and information projects benefit from crowdsourcing!)