LukePDQ

There's been an interesting aggregation of articles on crowdsourcing I have been reading over last few weeks.  
There is no doubt that the term "crowdsourcing" resonates with a lot of people. From gestation to 500,000 google hits in 2+ weeks is a pretty good birth rate for a new term.  But it is a viable economic model; not a web 2.0 dot com without revenue.

In terms of the uptake of this as a viable business model; there are a number of commercial sites (some cited in Wired's original article - authored by Jeff Howe) already listed on Jeff's website at www.crowdsourcing.com.  These include many established sites, such as: Innocentive for pharma industry, NineSigma for scientists and technicians, RentaCoder for programmers, YourEncore for retirees, iStockphoto for photographs, Mechanical Turk and many others.

The *upside* of crowdsourcing is the ability of big corporates to drive down the internal business costs of R&D.   More beneficially, it offers a model for small businesses (SME's) to replicate the size and scale of a big company's R&D Dept.

The *downside* of crowdsourcing is the ability of big corporates to harness the global reach of the internet to recruit the masses who are willing to perform "task slices" or even complete project solutions for miniscule reward. This is more an ethical issue for those likely to mis-use this potential to create an army of data miners digging the dirt to mine nuggets of valuable data at peanut rates.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a good (bad?) example of the potential for, in effect, auctioning off people's honest labour (labor) for exploitative low rates of pay.

Who knows where it will all end.  There is the positive and creative side where an army of retirees, scientists, technicians, artists and amateur boffins are paid to provide innovative solutions for problems that big companies cannot solve from within their own work-force resources.  This is a valid commercial process where the price of hire and reward is determined by the value of a solution to the "problem owner".

But the term " backroom sweatshops " takes on a new meaning as crowdsourcing also defines a cheap remote labour pool for people with time on their hands to offer time-slices for hire across the internet.  Such tasks include, mining computer data lists, make telephone calls to extract company contact details, review restaurant services, proof-reading input/output data entries, etc.  Any repetitive data screening process that a software robot or computer program cannot solve or infer the correct answer is potentially a project for crowdsourcing.  And there's the rub, some sites are offering such iterative tasks to remote workers for as little as a few cents to $1.10 per hour for their completion.

# posted by Luke : 6/12/2006 03:25:00 pm