During the course of your umpteen registrations in several websites on the internet, you have actually helped humanity by your contribution towards digitizing years of old newspapers and books. Well, that sounds intriguing, but how exactly did this happen? By typing those annoyingly unreadable words (like the one in the image) to prove we aren't robots and access online content. In fact, all these days, by doing so, we have helped Google’s reCAPTCHA service by deciphering old texts that could not be read by computers. Not surprisingly 200 million such words are digitized everyday worth 150,000 hours of human effort.
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| Google's reCAPTCHA is one of the best examples of crowd-sourcing |
The above examples are what we formally call ‘Crowd-sourcing’, where the power of the ‘crowd’ is leveraged to obtain the needed services, ideas or content by broadcasting their need and soliciting contributions from the public. This online phenomena is becoming increasingly prominent that it is touted to be the future.
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| Source: bizmedia.com |
The evolution of crowdsourcing could to be attributed to the rise of the internet. Today, thousands of crowdsourcers complete tasks ranging from designing a logo for an individual website to solving complex problems for large corporations. The internet provided an ideal platform for these individuals to be more open in contributing towards web-based projects for various reasons. Importantly, a person’s online presence and his work are not physically judged or scrutinized by his corporation enabling him to express his artistic excellence.
The increasing penetration of the internet especially in the developing countries will only add to the geographical and cultural diversity that are required to accomplish large scale projects in a distributed environment.
Crowd-sourcing enables an organization to use the power and ‘willingness to work’ of the public at an affordable price. It allows a firm to outsource its task to a wider group of people volunteering themselves to perform that task at a pre-agreed price. The inordinately large volume of information generated with the advent if internet is usually accompanied with the difficulty of categorizing them. For example, take the case of an e-commerce site trying to provide clear, concise and personalized information for every customer. It is almost impossible for it to employ the required manpower to describe and categorize its inventory amidst it ever-growing online content. By doing so, the e-commerce site is also able to accomplish this with the perspective of the common people most of whom are its potential customers at a fair price. With all the companies striving to produce more with lesser resources, this model of outsourcing is only going to be refined and scaled up.
Crowd-sourcing is all set to become a melting pot where collaborative and conscious efforts are made to generate ideas and better insights using the raw intelligence of the ‘crowd’. Companies are finding this evolve into an organic process of generating solutions with a social perspective presenting a platform where related innovations to future projects and product improvements are welcomed through what is now famously termed ‘Crowd-storming’.
The FMCG giant Procter & Gamble through its “Connect + Develop” concept encourages people to come up with their innovative solutions. External innovations play a key role in nearly 50% of their products. The ideas and solutions generated through this open environment are accepted and applied in a wide range of activities including packaging & design, marketing models etc. With a demanding as well as a rapidly dynamic business environment, open innovation would become a necessity rather than a luxury to possess.
The same platform is also used to get precious feedback about the products/services that are to be launched in the near future. Websites such as Feedbackarmy.com, Utest.com offer high quality usability testing through the ‘crowd’ that simulate the actual environment in the best possible way before it is made available publicly.
Another similar phenomenon is the advent of incentives to promote network externalities in a community. Enabling the community members to follow others, vote on choices, share and distribute content, ‘upvote’ comments or stream updates and rewarding them for doing all this stuff ensures that the original content is curated through the ‘crowd’ to gain prominence among the other members of the network. With more and more consumption happening digitally, the engagement of the ‘crowd’ only has an upward trajectory.
The wide reaching extent of social impact that crowd-sourcing can create is only left to our imagination. Crowd-sourcing is now used to address some important social problems like social science experiments, artistic and educational research etc. There were even large scale projects like the Mckinsey’s Job rising challenge to control unemployment in the US. The case of the 2010 Haiti earthquake saw what was unprecedented in the crowd-sourcing realm. Most of the international relief workers who had arrived to help the locals did not know the Haitian language or geography. Text messages from the locals were translated through crowd-sourcing platforms and were then categorized, geolocated within 5 minutes and used to find the missing people.
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| A snapshot of the MH370 data collection page on tomnod.com |
Even as the world grappled with the mystery of the Malaysian flight MH370, more than 3 million volunteers from around the world came together to investigate the satellite images put forward by tomnod.com. With the technological advancements and its associated complexity, mankind has to come together during times of natural disasters to help each other out for which crowd-sourcing provides an ideal template to build upon.
The idea of crowd-sourcing apart from using the wisdom and intelligence of the crowd is ultimately a means of bringing people together of similar interests and make them exchange ideas for the collective good. The current models of crowd-sourcing that include community driven collaboration and marketplace are going to be scaled up upon multiple iterations. This great phenomenon is going to change the way we perceive internet and is definitely here to stay.
Article by: Saravanakumar, PGP 2013-15
