Crowdsourcing, is it useful or what?

Hello all and welcome to my blog. Once again I will be talking about topics regarding Strategic Communication. This week I will talking about crowdsourcing and the usefulness of crowdsourcing. So, what is crowdsoucrcing? The definition of crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. How can we use crowdsourcing? Well crowdsourcing can be used to gather thousands of contributors to add a contribution for the greater good of success. In our everyday lives crowdsourcing is used especially online. People who have issues with appliances, cars, smartphones, etc. you can go online and you're guaranteed to find a forum where people are expereicning the same issue and have things you can try to fix it before spending money or shipping your product back to the company that made it to fix it. I myself have been on forums for my video game consoles, my televisions, my vehicle, and my smartphone for issues I was having and in most cases I was able to get my issued resolved without having to spend money. Other crowdsourcing on the internet is a venue individuals can use to share their projects while not being scrutinized. The projects can be worked on with as little or as many people as needed or whoever wants to be apart of it. An example would be Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited internet encyclopedia. Any one with access to the internet and access to the site can edit almost any of the articles. The danger in that is that all the information on Wikipedia is not always accurate and if 500 million visitors a month to the site errors and misinformation are to be expected.

Types of Crowdsourcing

There are several different types of crowdsourcing that can be used in the commercial world. These include crowdvoting, crowdfunding, creative crowdsourcing and inducement prize contests. I am going to talk about crowdfunding since I know more about this type of crowdsourcing. The reason I know a bit about crowdfunding is because I am videogamer and just like major record companies, movie studios, and video game companies, there are independent ones. Usually, an indie video game company launches a crowdfunding campaign to secure funds to fund their project and get it on the device of their choice whether that be a video game console, pc, mac, smartphone, etc. This type of crowdfunding is called a kickstarter. The Ouya microconsole is an example of the second most successful kickstarter campaign. Over $8.5 million was raised to fund the device. When people are passionate about something and they can find other people to fund their project it's almost always successful. There is a 43.99% success rate for projects thats get crowdfunded. Other notable thing about crowdfunding it's used to support citizen journalism which I talked about last week.

Another type of crowdsourcing is called crowdsourcing creative work or CCW. It is an open call to the crowd for novel and useful solutions. When experts are in scarce supply, multiple diverse ideas and contextual insights are needed. So, you get a bunch of like minded people together with great ideas and in most cases crowdsourcing works.

Innovation

In one of our articles this week it talks about crowdsourcing overlapping with collaborative innovation such as open innovation and user innovation. I can agree with that. Crowdsourcing is all about innovation and you get to innovate with lots of different people. There is a figure in the article that shows crowdsourcing with co-creation overlapping with crowdsourcing, user innovation and open innovation. 

Individuality

Despite this age of collaboration, we are still living in an age of increased individuality. One of our articles this week talks about the Age of Reason, the rise of digital communication. This new age will empower individuals at the expense of the elite. So, what does that mean exactly? Well, to me that means that communications will be catered to the individual. For example several different people can go onto Google to search for something. They will log into their Google accounts and based on their search history, viewing history, they will get different results by searching for the same thing. I have several Google accounts. One that I had to create when Google bought YouTube and one that I had to create when I got my first android smartphone. It keeps a record of my contacts and search history in Google. When using the different accounts I get different results from each search because on the older account I was searching for different things then what I search for now. The same can be same about all the people that use Google. Despite this individuality, peopled viewpoints may not be getting across. According to the article written by Yasmin Anwar, less than 10 percent of the U.S. population is participating in most online production activities. Alot of that from what the article says comes from the digital divide between the poor and working classes lacking the resources to participate online. This article was written in 2011 and so I am sure that 10 percent has to have gone up as almost every device has internet from your phone and tablet, to your library, school, McDonalds. 

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is definitely in full effect. Internet usage is higher than ever even though as recent as 2012, North America only made up 11.4% of the internet users in the world. Asia actually has 44.8% users online. This goes back into what I was saying about the digital divide. If North America wants to be on top with innovation, this has to change and hopefully it already has. We have to make a way to have affordable internet, which people of all classes can get online and benefit from what it has to offer. Crowdsourcing has definitely shown that people do want to collaborate and expand on their ideas. Thank you for reading my blog this week and tune in next week for my next posting.