Harry Potter and the Wisdom of Crowds
Posted on February 16, 2009
Filed Under Trends |
Imagine arriving at your office, connecting your computer and finding out that part of your daily work has already been solved by two chaps in Mexico, one in Australia, and a distinguished German mister that you have never met before but happened to find your job interesting. What would be your reaction? Would you enjoy the feeling of just being responsible of improving what’s been done and delegate other tasks to some unknown mob or would you rather keep the tasks for yourself and your traditional-tailor-made team, for those who know how the processes and methods in your company work?
Well, if you chose the first situation as your preferred one, you can call yourself a crowdsourcing follower (even when the crowd, in this case, was just a bunch of people that can be counted with a hand), a phenomena that is kicking hard in many fields of science, entertainment and, with increasing power, business.
Draw now in your head a world where you would be able to vote who do you want to be in the lineup of your favourite football team. Or where you -and only you- would be able to discover intelligent signals from the outter space. Or even which laws shall be approved during the next meeting in the Parliament. All these examples are not science-fiction or product of a creative imagination any more, they are a reality and, not surprisingly, a successful marketing tool.
As Jeff Howes, owner of crowdsourcing.com, mentions in his page, there may be two complementary definitions for Crowdsourcing:
The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
Start with the (in)famous Wikipedia, one of the first examples of this collaborative world, and move through social initiatives, football clubs owned by 50.000 people, fashion clothes designed by an invisible staff, even the acclaimed Android, a user-developed operational system, or projects that could never be finished with the nowadays existing technology. The list seems quite long, and it increases every week, and the possibilities are even scary, if one thinks carefully about it.
James Surowiecki, in his book, published four years ago, already mentioned anecdotes and case studies about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. At first sight, this appears to be a perfect application for tough or long-lasting tasks related to your business, an excuse to outsource work without a previous selection process, and in which every contributor is just responsible of a very small fraction of the whole situation.
Now, think about the fall-backs of this kind of scenarios. Do you really want to see a bunch of unknown people being able to decide where is the money of your company going, or providing you results of a study that you cannot prove? Also, considering that thousands of people can contribute to that, don’t you think that ‘no one to point at, no one to blame’ would be a likely scenario of your company´s apocalypse?
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[...] - bookmarked by 5 members originally found by mimiqiao on 2008-12-08 Harry Potter and the Wisdom of Crowds http://frozeneconomy.com/?p=6 - bookmarked by 3 members originally found by CyberNavigator on [...]
[...] On the other hand there are those focused on improving lives of those who happened to be born in a country without the resources we are able to enjoy, such as a proper health, sanitation, education or employment opportunities. Some of the most known examples of this would be associations like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute or Unicef, among many others. These follow a traditional model in which individuals or corporations (or government) donate their money and they invest this in building up (literally or metaphorically) ways of improving the life conditions of those in need. Others, like United Nations Volunteers or Nabuur, strike to connect volunteers worldwide that don’t need to go onsite in order to help but rather offer their time in order to organize tasks, translate documents, plan strategies or obtain funds. These are the ones that, ultimately, may be able to save the world by making it sustainable through a version of crowdsourcing. [...]
Hi. I like the way you write. Will you post some more articles?
Hi. I like the way you write. Will you post some more articles?…