Crowdsourcing Gaurang Jadia CS575 Human Issues in Computing

Outline Introduction Big Picture: Process Breaking down to Models Crowd Wisdom Harvesting Distributed Intellect Crowdsourcing Is Not Open Source Case Study: Threadless.com Possibilities & Research

Introduction Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that has emerged in recent years Act of a company / institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined network of people in the form of an open call

Introduction (Cont.) It is not open source production but superior in many ways Problems solved and products designed by the crowd become the property of companies

Big Picture: Process

Breaking down to Models Collective Intelligence ▫Dell & Goldcorp: New products and Ideas Crowd Creation ▫Current TV & Frito-Lay: New segments and Video Ads Crowd Voting ▫Threadless: Vote for their favorite T-shirt design Crowd Funding ▫SellaBand & Kiva: To underwrite new music and fund microloans to individuals

Crowd Wisdom: But how can this be? Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them Also, wisdom of crowds’ is derived not from averaging solutions, but from aggregating them The web provides a perfect technology capable of aggregating millions of disparate, independent ideas

Harvesting Distributed Intellect It is called collective intelligence, which is capability of crowds networked through web technologies. “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity”

Harvesting Distributed Intellect (Cnt) Necessary conditions to harvest are ▫Diversity of opinion, ▫Independence, ▫Decentralization ▫Aggregation of the crowd by network technology The web is one of the technology that enables a certain kind of thinking, stimulates a certain kind of innovation. ▫It results in distributed intellect and again web provide platform to harvest that intellect very efficiently

Crowdsourcing Is Not Open Source Open Source: ▫It involves allowing access to the essential elements of a product (such as source code for software) to anyone for the purpose of collaborative improvement to the existing product, with the continued transparency and free distribution of the product through the various stages of open development  Ex. Mozilla Firefox and Linux

Continue Companies do crowdsourcing to find solutions to problems and collect facts, data It benefits both companies and crowd as companies aim to get maximum profile from solutions and crowd gets awards Ex. Netflix Prize (2006) Companies reserve all solutions and gain profit and ever R&D solutions

Case Study: Threadless.com It crowdsources the design process by ongoing online compition Started by Jake Nickell (20) and Jacob DeHart (19) in 2000 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’

How Threadless.com works Free Membership with valid address Member can vote and submit design online Submissions are rated from 1 to 5 scale with ‘I’d buy it!’ box New designs are available for 2 weeks from the day of submission and the highest scoring designs are selected by Threadless staff to be printed and made available for sale Winners receive awards worth of 2,000 USD

More Successful Examples iStockphoto: Micropayment business model Wikipedia: Contribution to Articles reCAPTCHA: Scan Book (OCR) Netflix Prize: Collaborative filtering algorithm Google Translate: Collect, Alter translation InnoCentive: Research and Development Katrina People Finder Project: To find lost people after Katrina And many more…

Croudsourcing Trailer: Jeff Howe

Possibilities Offers individuals in the crowd a chance at entrepreneurship It is easy to participate and no basic requirements. Ex. Threadless.com No bar for age and geographic locations. Ex. iStockphoto Provide better employment and freelance work Ex. For Coders and Gamers

Research There is much for the cultural critic and the communication scholar to do research Collection of Success stories and interviews Tracking which crowdsourcing ventures fail and which ones succeed should also be part research New ways to make it more efficient

Reference Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving by Daren C. Brabham The Wisdom of the Business Crowd by Jeff Howe rchives/2009/09/google_revisits.htmlhttp:// rchives/2009/09/google_revisits.html