Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web
2.0 makes it clear that
“crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only
RIAs:
“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”
Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people
‘contribute’ something to the ‘system’.
There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work
in different areas. For example, at
the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants
who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting
is the story behind Kluster:
Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup,
And from the June 2006 Wired magazine
Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem
“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t
More examples are:
- Dell Idea Storm where customers votefor what products they want Dell to do next – this is how Dell’s
recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
- Get Satisfaction which is“people-powered customer service”
- Intel asking the crowd on what is thenext Google
- MicroPledge and co fundos where people pledge their money forsoftware ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someonetakes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes itsuccessfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the softwarethey want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
- Sell-a-Band where people pledge theirmoney on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets torecord an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, theband and the SellaBand website share the profit.
- Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneursin developing countries.
- Wesabe for personal finance.
- CrowdSpirit for electronics.
- Threadless for T-shirts.
- Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
- Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcinga book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
- We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
- And many manymore.
Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective
(which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).
The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top
10 largest websites in the world.
The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about
crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British
(via IndiaUncut) –
this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!
But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people
contribute to Wikipedia?
The best research on this topic that I found was the article What
the CACM monthly magazine:
I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping
into some of these motivations.
The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these
motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high
Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole
article, it’s a good piece of research.
Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian:
encyclopedia which traces
how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become
a member of the community, and how the social
and technological
aspects enable this.
I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of
Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same
Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of
I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than
…
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an
encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same
applies to the other examples above. For example, consider
Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for
people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and
technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients
that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?
Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.
Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes
successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from
content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like
Amazon/eBay, etc.
Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced
anything in an India-specific way?
Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.