IDEA No 90
CROWDSOURCING
In 1996, photographer Rick Smolan reinvented the time capsule. He invited writers, photographers, designers and computer programmers from across the world to collaborate on a photo essay, ‘24 Hours in Cyberspace’.
Depicting the impact of the Web on the everyday lives of different people around the world, the project had 4 million hits in the 24 hours it was active. It was the largest one-day collaborative online event of its time.
Although it was almost a decade before the term came into public use, ‘24 Hours in Cyberspace’ was one of the earliest examples of online ‘crowdsourcing’, the term coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson of WIRED magazine to describe the emerging practice of distributing labour-intensive tasks across online users and communities – in other words, ‘the crowd’.
The open-source movement has been harvesting the collective power of individual programmers since the 60s. What is true of the programming community seems to be true of people in general. While the benefit is sometimes monetary, more often contributors are motivated by kudos, altruism and even good old-fashioned problem-solving.
Crowdsourcing works on the basis that ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ is greater than that of an individual, even if that individual is an expert – an idea James Surowiecki devoted a whole book to. Surowiecki’s opening example in The Wisdom of Crowds dates back to 1906, when the crowd at a county fair were asked to guess individually the weight of a butchered ox. The average guess was much closer than that of cattle experts.
Just as we have moved on from the days of butchered oxen, so the wisdom of the crowd has been harnessed in ever more innovative ways. In the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, thousands of volunteers worked together to create the Katrina PeopleFinder Project, an online database of those missing and found, and a virtual-messaging centre for those trying to locate family and friends.
Crowdsourcing has been used to solve programming problems, translate books, create logos, produce interactive maps and find cures to diseases. Kickstarter uses the crowdsourcing approach as an alternative form of financing start-up businesses. Dell IdeaStorm uses the collective power of its customers to come up with new ideas for products and services. The list goes on. Forget too many cooks, this is all about people power.■
‘Crowdsourcing works on the principle that “the wisdom of the crowd” is greater than that of an individual’
A crowdsourced flashmob dances at the Palais Royal Square in Paris to celebrate the life of dancer Dominique Bagouet.