Crowdsourcing

Chapter 3: From So Simple a Beginning, Continued

The comments I've been getting have been very helpful—thank you all. One quick request, however. I got the sense from one commenter that he felt I might have been off in my facts. He asked whether I would be publishing my sourcework. The answer is an emphatic yes, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't love a correction now! That's part of the experiment here. I'm posting pre-polished copy. While I'll be scrubbing everything to within an inch of its life before publication, if you see that I've erred, tell me.

I'm going to jump right back in, though not quite where I left off. After my short history of the open source software movement I write about the fateful moment when Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales decided to apply then-new Wiki technology to their online encyclopedia, which was called "Nupedia." The world, suffice to say, hasn't been the same since. I end the chapter with the passage reproduced below, which illustrates how mainstream open source principles have become, and what incredible promise their application holds for a wide range of fields, including one of our government's most moribund agencies, the US Patent and Trademark Office. Without further ado, here's the final segment of Chapter 3: From So Simply a Beginning:

From Peer to Peer to Patents

It’s funny how fate often turns on last-minute decisions. In late October 2005, the Berkeley political scientist Steven Weber was bringing some of the smartest people he knew into a Manhattan conference room to talk about the future of business. Weber and a co-author were writing a book about “open source methods of value creation” and wanted some heavyweights to “beat up our argument.” Invitees included a former adviser to Vice-President Al Gore, an editor from Harvard University Press, and various top executives at New York consulting firms. Then, just one day before the gathering, Weber’s host suggested he invite Beth Noveck, a professor at the New York School of Law and something of a provocateur in the legal fields. Weber vaguely remembered sharing bagels and lox with a smart, self-possessed woman at an Upper West Side deli a few years before, and extended the invitation. Noveck nearly turned Weber down. She was booked all day, she explained, but would try to stop by for an hour or two.

The following day dawned sunny and warm. Weber’s brain trust gathered inside a windowless conference room inside the plush offices of Monitor Consulting Group on Madison Avenue. Noveck showed up shortly after 11 AM. Weber sat her next to David Kappos, a lawyer who managed IBM’s patent portfolio. The two were soon engaged in an intense conversation. Noveck had recently created Do Tank, an online community of lawyers, scholars and students devoted to collaborative efforts at legal reform. Noveck was one of the legal field’s chief proponents of opening closed systems to public scrutiny, and the patent system was right in her cross-hairs.

The Eyes and Ears of the Crowd ...

This one's so obvious I can't believe I didn't already suggest it to my own home team, the New York Yankees. Why rely on professional scouts—few in number, limited in resources—when you can animate the power of the crowd to do the scouting for you. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported on how the St. Louis Cardinals are asking their fans to identify baseball talent that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The "One for the Birds" contest is meant to help the team find talent at smaller, non-Division I colleges that don't get much attention from scouts. Fans file entries by going to the Carindals' Website and filling out a form, including the player's name, statistics and a summarized recommendation of up to 300 words and other information. When the submissions are in, the team plans to send its own scounts to evaluate a handful of the most interesting prospects. ... The winning fan gets a trip to St. Louis to see a pair of games.

I'd like to tease out two themes here. The first is that by offering so little in the way of compensation—one fan gets to see two free games—the Cards are recognizing what's come to be an accepted fact of crowdsourcing efforts: We ain't in it for the money, we do it for the fun.

More interesting, and more important, is something else entirely: The "One for the Birds" program also recognizes that what the crowd excels at isn't so much analysis as it is data collection. This has become a central theme in my book as well. We're entering a period that can be thought of as Crowdsourcing's second iteration, and a big part of that involves downscaling what we expect from the crowd.

I'll close by pointing out a close parallel from a wildly divergent field, journalism. Amanda Michel, my former colleague from our crowdsourced journalism experiment, Assignment Zero, now runs Off the Bus for the Huffington Post. She's also come to recognize that her community works best when it aims small. Proof of this is the recently launched Off the Bus Super Delegate Investigation. Did she ask people to write features about the delegate process? Or to write Op-Eds on whether Super-Dels should go with the will of the people or the will of the party elite? Nope and nope. She gave them a questionnaire and assigned each volunteer to ask a series of uniform questions to every one of the Super Delegates. It's a task that would have overwhelmed the physical resources of any newsroom (though importantly, not its intellectual resources.) But for a few hundred geographically dispersed volunteers it's a breeze, requiring neither training nor a large commitment of time.

These are the kinds of models that hold enormous promise, and that I predict we'll see much more of in coming months and years. Humble in intellectual pretense but ambitious in scope, they are well-suited to that most salient characteristic of a crowd: it has numbers on its side.

Chapter 3: From So Simple a Beginning

Another excerpt to peruse. As always, hack away at it with your sharpest blades. I'm leading off with the beginning of Chapter 3, but so as not to disturb continuity too much, here's a synopsis of the end of Chapter 2:

Following where we left off, I go on to argue that our current rise in amateur activity can be attributed, in part, to the "over-education of the middle class," a winking characterization of the enormous increase in undergraduate enrollments that started in the wake of WW II. The argument, to wit, is that as a society we train people to think broadly and critically, and yet we employ them to follow directions and perform a highly limited range of tasks, a vestige of the assembly-line mentality (Fordism) that still dominates our approach to production, be it automobiles or information.

The rest of the chapter goes back to examples, but doesn't make any new points except to show that "amateur" is a designation requiring much latitude these days (am I an "amateur" blogger? I don't get paid for it, though I'm a "professional" writer), and to show that the same rise of amateurism is affecting the sciences as profoundly as the arts. Here's how I summarize the amateurism argument at the end of Chapter 2:

And crowdsourcing has no more regard for professional qualifications than it does nationality. InnoCentive and iStock are pure meritocracies—all that matters is the final product. This is one of its greatest strengths. One revealing MIT study into InnoCentive revealed that solvers were more successful when they had less experience in the relevant discipline. In other words, chemists were better suited to solving life biology problems, and vice-versa. This is less surprising than it seems at first blush. If a P&G chemist could have solved a stubborn predicament in his own field, it would have never wound up posted to InnoCentive’s Website. This is powerful mojo: The untrained are also untainted. Their greatest asset is a fresh set of eyes, which is simply a restatement of the truism that with many eyes, all flaws become evident, and easily corrected. But that concept wasn’t always clear. It took a handful of renegade computer programmers show just how powerful the law of large numbers could be.

Which brings us to that most fundamental building block of crowdsourcing, the open source software movement. The first bits of Chapter 3 after the jump.