Crowd-Sourcing
What is Crowdsourcing?
· Crowd sourcing was introduced by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in Wired Magazine in June 2006.
· Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by asking contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.
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· Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people.
· The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.
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· According to Daren C. Brabham defined "crowdsourcing" as an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model.
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· "Crowdsourcing is channeling the experts’ desire to solve a problem and then freely sharing the answer with everyone."
· This process is often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, and can also occur offline.
· It combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result.
· Famous Example: Wikipedia. Instead of Wikipedia creating an encyclopedia on their own, hiring writers and editors, they gave a crowd the ability to create the information on their own. The result? The most comprehensive encyclopedia this world has ever seen.
· Example: The Government of India is proposing a platform to digitize various kinds of physical records through crowd sourcing.
· MyGov is organizing a competition (the "Contest") for creation/ development of a Mobile Application ("App") for the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
Prizes for Winner
ü Idea Phase (Phase-I): Ideas selected by the jury will win an Android One device from Google and a Certificate of Appreciation from MyGov.
ü Wireframe development phase (Phase-II): The top 5 shortlisted teams will get Certificate of Appreciation from MyGov and an opportunity to be mentored by Google to build the mobile app.
ü App Development phase (Phase-III): The winning team will get a Sponsored trip to the Unites States of America to meet a team of Google Developers, subject to Terms and Conditions.
· Example: McDonalds Burger builderbuild a burger
· In 2014, McDonalds decided to give their customers free reign and submit ideas for the types of burgers they’d like to see in store. They could create their perfect burgers online and the rest of the country could vote for the best ones. In Germany, creators were also encouraged to create their own campaigns, which included viral videos and other valuable content marketing, which of course cost McDonalds nothing.
· Once the winners were crowned, McDonalds released the burgers weekly, along with the picture and short bio of the creator.
· Example: Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.
· Crowdsourcing & Quality: The principle of crowdsourcing is that more heads are better than one. By canvassing a large crowd of people for ideas, skills, or participation, the quality of content and idea generation will be superior.
· The advantages for a firm of outsourcing to a crowd rather than performing operations in-house is that firms can gain access to a very large community of potential workers who have a diverse range of skills, expertise and who are able to complete activities within a short time-frame and often at a much reduced cost as compared to performing the task in-house.
· To generate interest and increase participation, companies typically sponsor monetary incentives, contests, or rewards.
Fig:1 describes Crowdsourcing process, where firms parcel out work to some sort of community (normally online), offering payment for anyone in the ‘crowd’ who completes the task the firm has set.
Different Types of Crowdsourcing
1. Crowd-source Design
If you’re looking for a logo design, you can tell a crowd of designers what you want, how much you will pay, and your deadline. All interested designers will create a finished design specifically for you. You’ll receive 50-300+ different finished logo designs, and you can keep whichever design you like the best. By doing design this way, crowdsourcing actually increases the quality & decreases the price, compared to online free lancing.
Crowdsourcing can also be used to get designs for furniture, fashion, advertisements, video, & product design. Just about anything that can be designed can be crowdsourced.
Example of Crowdsource Design: Threadless
Threadless.com is a web-based T-shirt company that crowdsources the design process for their shirts through an ongoing online competition. The company formed when Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart met through an online design forum, both entered into a T-shirt design competition, and Nickell won. They formed skinnyCorp and its flagship property, Threadless, in late 2000 when Nickell was only 20 and DeHart only 19 years old (Nickell and DeHart, n.d.). Based in Chicago, skinnyCorp today is the umbrella company for OMG Clothing, Extra Tasty, Naked and Angry, Yay Hooray, and other message boards and businesses in the company’s mission: ‘skinnyCorp creates communities’ (Our Ideas, n.d.; skinnyCorp, n.d.). None of skinnyCorp’s other properties are as successful as Threadless, however, and none more true to the crowdsourcing definition; as of June 2006, Threadless was ‘selling 60,000 T-shirts a month, [had] a profit margin of 35 per cent and [was] on track to gross $18 million in 2006’, all with ‘fewer than 20 employees’ (Howe, 2006e). With its profits, Threadless has also made large donations to organizations such as the Red Cross in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Anyone may join the Threadless community free with a valid email address, and membership in the community – in the crowd – grants access to vote on designs or to submit them. To submit a design, community members download either an Adobe Flash or Adobe Photoshop template, follow the guidelines for image quality and number of colors, and upload their design back to Threadless. From there, designs are scored on a zero-to-five scale, with an option to check an ‘I’d buy it!’ box, and a new design to be scored becomes available to the community. Designs remain available for voting for two weeks, and the highest scoring designs are selected by Threadless staff to be printed and made available for sale on the website. In a typical week there are at least three new shirts for sale and at least one reprinted shirt, reprinted by overwhelming demand from the community. For designer shirts, they are priced affordably, at around US$15, or US$10 during their frequent sales, all due to the low cost of designing them. Winning designers receive US$1,500 in cash and US$500 worth of Threadless t-shirts and gift certificates. However, US$2000 is a very low price for design services that yield such high profits. Threadless also boasts a street team (for promotional needs) and rewards its members with purchasing credits for referring sales by linking to the website or by submitting photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts they own.
2. Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding involves asking a crowd of people to donate money to your project. For example, if you want to raise $10,000 to pay for studio time to record a new CD, crowdfunding can help you raise that money.. You find a crowdfunding platform, set the goal amount, deadline, and any rewards offered to donors. You must raise 100% of your goal before the deadline, or all the donations are returned to the donors. Deadlines are typically less than 60 days.
Crowdfunding is mostly used by artists, charities, & start-ups to raise money for projects such as filming adocumentary, manufacturing an iPod watch, cancer research, or seed money. Read more about crowdfunding orbrowse crowdfunding sites.
3. Microtasks
Microtasking involves breaking work up into tiny tasks and sending the work to a crowd of people. If you have 1,000 photos on your website that need captions, you can ask 1,000 individual people to each add a caption to one photo. Break up the work and decide the payment for each completed task (typically .01¢ – .10¢ per task). With microtasking, you can expect to see results within minutes. Microtasking can involve tasks such as scanning images, proofreading, database correction and transcribing audio files.
Work is done faster, cheaper, and usually with less errors (when validation systems are in place). Additionally, microtasks can often be performed by people in less fortunate countries, including those with SMS capabilities but without computers. Read more about microtasks orbrowse microtasks sites.
4. Open Innovation
If you are unsure of where to begin with an idea for a business opportunity, whether it’s product design or perhaps a marketing firm, crowdsourcing can help through open innovation. Open innovation allows people from all aspects of business such as investors, designers, inventors, and marketers to collaborate into a functional profit making reality. This can be done either through a dedicated web platform to gain outside perspective, or used with only internal employees.
Open innovation brings together people from different parts of the world and different sectors of business to work together on a project. This is effectively a collection of different fields and levels of expertise that would not otherwise be available to any budding entrepreneur. It also elevates previously considered uninvolved parties, such as investors, to roll up their sleeves and impart their knowledge, essentially becoming more than just a cash cow.
Pros & Cons
· Crowdsourcing’s biggest benefit is the ability to receive better quality results, since several people offer their best ideas, skills, & support.
· Crowdsourcing allows you to select the best result from a sea of ‘best entries,’ as opposed to receiving the best entry from a single provider.
· Results can be delivered much quicker than traditional methods, since crowdsourcing is a form of freelancing. You can get a finished video within a month, a finished design or idea within a week, and microtasks appear within minutes.
· Clear instructions are essential in crowdsourcing. You could potentially be searching through thousands of possible ideas, which can be pains taking, or even complicated, if the instructions are not clearly understood. Some forms of crowdsourcing do involve spec work, which some people are against. Quality can be difficult to judge if proper expectations are not clearly stated.
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