A Million Heads ...

This is one of those days when the blog is about 15 on my to do list, but I'd be unforgivably remiss if I didn't point my readers a post Josh Catone published on crowdsourcing at the Read/Write Web blog yesterday. This in itself isn't unusual; every week or so someone writes a primer on crowdsourcing for his or her respective audience. More power to 'em.

Catone's addition to this growing and, until now largely redundant literature is noteworthy, however. It marks a departure from posts that essentially restate the thesis of my original article using the same old examples. For one, Catone divides and conquers, illustrating how the crowd produces value in a number of different ways. In this it's reminiscent of another excellent post from Sami Viitamäki, a grad student at the University of Helsinki doing his thesis research on crowdsourcing. (I won't adumbrate Sami's in here, but please go read for yourself if you haven't already.) Both posts are evidence that we're beginning to advance our understanding of the phenomenon. Titled "A Million Heads are Better Than One," Catone's essay is an astute examination of a few of the most significant and often overlooked examples of crowdsourcing. Here's what caught my eye:

Catone notes that Google's Pagerank itself is an application of the Wisdom of the Crowds. I haven't dealt with Pagerank in any sort of depth way because it's not crowdsourcing, per se. But it is a case in which a company is deriving an enormous revenue from a function of the crowd—namely, the sites to individuals choose to link on their own blogs. I'm always surprised how rarely it's viewed in this light. Here's Catone:

Perhaps the best exponent so far of Web 'wisdom of crowds' is Google, which organizes websites based on how they link to each other. Google sees links as votes for the relevance of a page. It is of course more complicated than that, but one can make the argument that Google works by utilizing the wisdom of crowds to determine which websites are the most relevant.

I don't think there's an argument to be had; that's wisdom of the crowds by any definition.

Catone divides Crowdsourcing into three sub-categories: Creation, Prediction, and Organization. This is slightly different than the divisions I'm using in my book, but it's close. His creation examples are those readers of CS.com already know well—Cambrian House and CrowdSpirit. Even here Catone ferrets out the overlooked nugget:

It appears possible that people are actually making money from Cambrian House. Their website has a calculator that estimates that with "good" growth, a person with 100 royalty points (the amount you receive for coming up with an original idea) would make $153,600 over a three year period. Not sure exactly what constitutes "good growth" though...

Although Cambrian House crowdsources the conception and creation of its web products, ideas are subject to editorial review by a core team and actual production is subject to a set of quality guidelines. In the case of conflicting code or design contributions, the community decides which is the best.

Cambrian House is always a great case study for examination, not least because CH is always fiddling around with their community production model, and tend to put pragmatism and efficiency ahead of any conceptual consistency. (Which, if it's not clear, I think it great. A theory's just a hypothesis unless it works on the ground as well as on paper.) I haven't looked into CH's books lately, and I love the bit about what 100 royalty points nets you. All eyes will be on CH in the next year or so to see how these products pan out for its community. I think the company gets a bad rap for somehow exploiting the sanctity of open source development. My cautious prediction is, "hogwash," but then the proof will be in the pudding.

My favorite bit in Catone's post are the conclusions he reaches:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints. To harness the collective intelligence of crowds, there need to be rules in place to maintain order.
2. Not everything can be democratic. Sometimes a decision needs to be made, and having a core team (or single person) make the ultimate decision can provide the guidance necessary to get things done and prevent crazy ideas and groupthink from wreaking havoc on your product.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality.  Encourage your group to   disagree, and try not to let any members of the group disproportionately influence the rest.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it. It is important to note that in most of the above projects, the group merely votes on the final product; they do not actually create it (even at Cambrian House, where the group collaborates to create the product, individuals are still creating each piece on their own and the group votes on whose implementation of an idea is best).

These dovetail neatly with what we're trying to implement on AssignmentZero: A hyrbid (aka, "Pro-Am") system in which the worst instincts of the crowd are mitigated by a layer of checks and balances administered by a skeleton crew of professionals, paid and un-paid.

But the concept I'd like to give the most emphasis to is Catone's third rule, that crowds must retain their individuality. This is Wisdom of Crowds 101, a principle which is clearly stated in James Surowiecki's book of same name.  Ask a classroom of people to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar: If they come up with an answer together, it'll be off by a mile, but have them write their answers individually and the mean will (more often than not) beat any individual answer.

This concept—that a crowd of individuals is smarter than any individual within it—is lost on a subset of crowdsourcing's critics, who persist in believing crowdsourcing is equatable somehow with groupthink.  Hogwash. That danger, as Catone points out, is there, but my prediction is that as crowdsourcing matures we're going to see better and better methods of keeping it in check.

Comments

[Elias]

I found the tip on privately contributing the most useful (children guessing the number of beans). Websites hosting polls should never show the current results before readers submit their opinion.
I'm taking a shot at writing with the gang at wearesmarter.com to see for myself the efficacy of this approach.

[Javier Marti]

I think that this trend if so strong that any company that doesn't start to operate marketing from the customers up, instead of the other way round, will be pushed out of the market in no time.
This is not only a social, but a stong commercial revolution we shouldn't' overlook.
Marketing has always been said to have the customer as the centre of everything, but we all know that as companies grow more bureaucratic, that stops happening.
Now they really have to do it, otherwise, in no time a competitor will set up shop and "steal" customers before they even realize what happened.
This will be in months, not years anymore...

regards
Javier
http://trendirama.com

[Shazz]

Ah, lots of nuggets of wisdom and thought provocation here! I'd like to focus in on a couple of nuggets:

1. Google ranks sites' relevance by tracking crowd links.
2. Crowds need constraints to harness (and retain) the individual intelligence that informs crowd wisdom.

Question: Building on these two statements, and Elias's comment above, most early majority "site linkers" will have been informed of the site Google ranking (and hence early/innovator crowd opinion) before making their links. Could Google constrain or step the site rankings to reduce the potential for "me too" groupthink?

[Daren C. Brabham]

Catone writes a good article and his summary of crowdsourcing at this point is needed, however I do find it a bit redundant of the literature that exists, both from Howe's original article and Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds book. I still see Catone operating within the defintions and constraints and rules set out by both Howe and Suroweicki.

I think it's important to tread very carefully on connecting crowd wisdom to crowdsourcing. For one, crowd wisdom demands some way to aggregate results, which I suppose means the technology of the Internet. Yet, aggregation is much more than this. There must be an exploration of how we are to effectively aggregate ideas (and other qualitative, not quantitative, solutions to crowdsourced problems) through media technology.

There are a lot of finer points like this that need to be flushed out to more clearly make the claim that crowdsourcing is something new and awesome, and is not merely some old wine in new bottles. For example, when I tell colleagues I'm researching crowdsourcing for my dissertation, I have to explain it, and they are always asking me how it differs from 1) global outsourcing we're seeing in business these days, 2) open source philosophy, 3) traditional call-for-proposals subcontracting that has long been going on in business, and many other aspects we already know a lot about. Honestly, I have a hard time explaining how crowdsourcing is harnessing all the best points of those existing models without merely replicating them.

We need to do a better job at making the case for how crowdsourcing is different from CFP subcontracting, global outsourcing, and open source. I've begun to explore how crowdsourcing is different from open source, mostly in that 1) open source projects have virtually no overhead (just ones and zeros) and crowdsourcing projects are more likely to work to create tangible manufactured products, 2) crowdsourcing applications, for all our praise of their decentralization that resembles open source projects, are actually quite centralized in that they require a company to post a call and, if applicable, offer a bounty, and 3) crowdsourcing, with its centralization and offer of a bounty, is more able to survive in a project no one is jazzed about than open source, because frankly some people will even do the dull work for a cash prize. I may formalize this 3-pronged argument into a post at some point, but it's the beginnings of the kind of work that needs to be done to legitimize crowdsourcing and make it more than a buzzword with a redundant literature base.

[alan]

To truly grasp the significance of CS’ing one might need to look at some thing other, or as well as economic, labor, open source principles and other such emerging manifestations.

The cultural, sociological and phenomenological aspects, when looked at from the greater standpoint of humanities on going development/relationship with technology and the changing human condition might, in retrospect, prove to be more illuminating.

The evolving human consciousness is after all determined by both outer circumstance and inner experience. As much as we might want to understand these phenomena, we need to examine not only the symptom but also its place of origin. Are paradigm shifts as arbiters of change merely unconnected events or do they speak to a greater causality? Alan.

[LukePDQ]

Some really interesting comments from all the above. As I read the points being made, I am struck by one thing. In many discussions on definitions of crowdsourcing, each writer is trying to map the pulse points of crowdsourcing by comparison (or differentiation) with other existing crowdsourcing models.
Often, these models have a frame of reference (or central agenda) in which crowdsourcers are 'invited' to contribute. In other words, the end point is roughly mapped and crowdsourcers are asked to complete the mapping detail by doing the grunt work.

Meanwhile, project leaders are busy controlling the process by manipulating, editing or choosing the inputs until they achieve a best fit to the desired or expected outcome. The examples Jeff gave back in his original Wired article on crowdsourcing fit the above.
ie, here's the 'problem', bring me a 'solution'.

Yet, for me, I am left thinking that the 'pure play' definition of crowdsourcing is - where there is no central agenda! Surely, it is the eclectic mix of insight and feedback from 'the crowd' that takes a project in myriad twisting turns from its starting point.

The *journey* = crowdsourcing.
The destination becomes apparent when the crowd determines they have nothing to add, because it meets a shared need or functional solution to the crowd.

Ironically, the clearest example I can give of this 'pure play' model, is the original open source software, where the end product bears no resemblance to the original code.
The final product is like nothing envisaged by the originator. The 'crowd' have taken something and evolved it to meet the needs or wishes of the crowd.

[test]

h t t p : / / w w w . c h e c k i t o u t w e a r . c o m

[G. Rosner]

Hi Jeff!
Indeed, crowdsourcing is popping up everywhere!

How did Barack Obama get so many votes? He crowdsourced his telephone banking on his website!!!

I loved Josh's article - and thanks for your comments as well. I know that a millionheads are better than one - and that's why we created http://www.millionheads.com - to allow people to use the wisdom of the crowd to help make personal choices and buying decisions.

The social polling engine is pretty new - and we'd love for everyone to check it out -

G.

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Some really interesting comments from all the above. As I read the points being made, I am struck by one thing. In many discussions on definitions of crowdsourcing, each writer is trying to map the pulse points of crowdsourcing by comparison (or differentiation) with other existing crowdsourcing models.

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