Crowdsourcing

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Crowdsourcing – what it isn’t |  So what exactly is crowdsourcing? |  Crowdsourcing – a typology |  Incentives and exploitation |  So what can be done with the power of crowdsourcing? |  My writings on crowdsourcing | Other folks studying crowdsourcing and related phenomena from a variety of angles

This page is devoted to clarifying the concept of crowdsourcing and putting forth a coherent typology of crowdsourcing for researchers, students, and members of the popular press. These ideas have grown out of my research on crowdsourcing over the years and through debates with others studying crowdsourcing. The typology presented on this page was first hashed out in a white paper I co-authored with Noah Friedland in 2009, and it appears in depth in my dissertation, Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: Leveraging the Collective Intelligence of Online Communities for Public Good, which was directed by Prof. Joy Pierce at the University of Utah. Please refer to these earlier works for citation purposes, or cite this article as a webpage authored by Daren C. Brabham in 2010. This typology will make its way into print in 2011 as a chapter in a forthcoming book by Routledge.

Crowdsourcing – what it isn’t

Jeff Howe, a contributing editor for Wired magazine, coined the term “crowdsourcing” in the June 2006 issue of Wired. His original article examined a variety of case studies from the business world and noted the similarities between the cases in the ways firms employed online communities–crowds–to solve problems and produce goods in efficient ways. Howe followed this article with a companion blog, and in 2008 he published a book on the topic.

Since Howe’s initial article, I have focused my career on expanding the understanding of crowdsourcing, backing speculation with empirical data, and at times defending the boundaries of the term “crowdsourcing.”

In my opinion, many writers in the popular press and many bloggers have since polluted the term “crowdsourcing,” conflating it with all manner of social media models. Many upstart “crowdsourcing experts” have also attempted to develop new consulting businesses around the term, further confusing it with other concepts in new media and business and furthering the reputation of crowdsourcing as merely an empty buzzword. Many people have made bold claims and blanket statements about what crowdsourcing is or is not, but few of these people have backed their statements with real research.

Crowdsourcing is not a term that applies to just any instance of an online community. Crowdsourcing is not a concept that has been around since before the Internet. Crowdsourcing is not the same thing as open source production, is not synonymous with “open innovation,” and is not just a model for making money online–to be sure, there are non-profit and government applications for crowdsourcing. Furthermore, “crowdsourcing” is spelled as a single word; it is not spelled “crowd sourcing” or “crowd-sourcing” or “CrowdSourcing.”

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So what exactly is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model. Crowdsourcing blends open innovation concepts with top-down, traditional management structures so that crowdsourcing organizations can effectively tap the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes. Wikis and open source software production are not considered crowdsourcing because there is no sponsoring organization at the top directing the labor of individuals in the online community. And when an organization outsources work to another person–even if that work is digital or technology-focused–that is not considered crowdsourcing either because there is no open opportunity for others to try their hands at that task.

Crowdsourcing works when an organization has a problem to solve or a product to design, and the organization opens that challenge up to an online community with specific solution parameters. Then, individuals in the online community work toward solving the problem or designing the product, and the sponsoring organization eventually takes ownership of the ideas and puts them to use, whether that means making a profit off of the ideas or applying those ideas to the public good, and ownership does not necessarily mean owning the intellectual property in a traditional legal sense.

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Crowdsourcing – a typology

There are four distinct crowdsourcing types, each appropriate for tackling different kinds of problems:

The Knowledge Discovery and Management Approach

This approach is useful when knowledge exists in the network (e.g., in written records, prior art, and other published sources) and there is a need to find and assemble that knowledge in a coherent way in a single location. Crowdsourcing organizations task online communities to find this knowledge and provide a framework in which individuals in the online community can assemble and manage that knowledge as it is found. This is similar to the way wikis work, except that in this case a crowdsourcing organization is directing the process, dictating exactly what needs to be found and where it needs to be deposited. Rather, Yochai Benkler calls processes such as Wikipedia’s “commons-based peer production.” An example of the Knowledge Discovery and Management Approach to crowdsourcing is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project, which tasked an online community with finding and reporting prior art in the review of applications to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The Broadcast Search Approach

Broadcast search is useful when an empirically right answer exists and the knowledge of a single expert (or handful of experts) somewhere in the network is needed to know the answer. Opening up the problem solving process through crowdsourcing is like casting a wide net, hoping to find the one needle in the haystack. Examples of the Broadcast Search Approach to crowdsourcing include InnoCentive, a company that allows scientific R&D problems to be broadcast to a base of scientists, and the Goldcorp Challenge, a past competition that tasked an online community with identifying gold deposits in a tract of land by making geophysical data available.

The Peer-Vetted Creative Production Approach

Peer-vetted creative production is useful when there is no empirically right answer, but rather the “right” answer is the one the market will support. In other words, when the “right” answer is a matter of consumer tastes or user preferences, this approach can help generate and vet original ideas to find a best choice. Examples of the Peer-Vetted Creative Production Approach to crowdsourcing include Threadless, a company that facilitates an ongoing t-shirt design contest; user-generated advertising contests, which task online communities with producing and selecting the next best advertisement for a company; and the Next Stop Design project, a competition to design the next best bus stop shelter for a transit system.

Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking

This final approach is useful when online communities are needed to perform tasks that require human intelligence in order to process large batches of data. Crowdsourcing organizations using this approach need massive amounts of microlabor to crunch large piles of information in systematic ways, yet computers are not capable of performing these processes. Organizations broadcast these data to online communities, which function in ways similar to computers in distributed computing systems like SETI@Home or Rosetta@Home. Examples of the Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking approach to crowdsourcing include Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allows companies to hire an online community to perform human intelligence tasks, and Subvert and Profit, a company that works to game social media ranking systems by distributing social media voting.

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Incentives and exploitation

In many cases, online communities involved in crowdsourcing applications are incentivized directly with cash and prizes. In essence, then, these crowds work in a freelance or speculative arrangement to make money. The focus on money as a bounty has drawn a lot of criticism, with some claiming that crowdsourcing is a process that exploits individuals in a kind of digital sweatshop labor arrangement. My research suggests otherwise. Crowds participate in crowdsourcing applications willingly, and they do not seem deceived or exploited by crowdsourcing organizations. Furthermore, crowds are not just motivated by money. Reputation, enjoyment, socializing, building a portfolio for future work, learning new skills – these are some of the many reasons crowds participate in crowdsourcing applications. It isn’t all about money, and crowds so far do not seem to be exploited in any traditional sense of the word.

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So what can be done with the power of crowdsourcing?

I have devoted the past several years to understanding how crowdsourcing can be translated into a model for public good. If it works so well for business, why can’t we put it to use for public participation programs in government decision making, or put it to use solving social and environmental problems? In my work with the Next Stop Design project, for instance, I tried to do just that, using the Peer-Vetted Creative Production Approach to allow an online community to participate in the design and selection of a bus stop shelter for Salt Lake City. The results of this project are promising, and I am working to find other applications of the crowdsourcing model to benefit the public good.

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My writings on crowdsourcing

Overviews, case studies, and typologies of crowdsourcing

• Brabham, D. C. (in press). Crowdsourcing: A model for leveraging online communities. In A. Delwiche & J. Henderson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Culture. PDF draft for comment (44 KB)
• Brabham, D. C. (2011). The benefits of effective internal crowdsourcing applications. In PR News’ employee communications guidebook (Vol. 3, pp. 53-56). New York: PR News Press.
• Friedland, N. S., & Brabham, D. C. (2009, December). Leveraging communities of experts to improve the effectiveness of large-scale research efforts. Renton, WA: The Friedland Group.
• Brabham, D. C. (2009, October). Leveraging the collective intelligence of online communities for public good. Keynote address given at the Utah Open Source Conference, Sandy, UT.
• Brabham, D. C. (2009). Crowdsourced advertising: How we outperform Madison Avenue. Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, 9(10). Link
• Brabham, D. C. (2009, March). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving. Presentation given at O’Reilly’s Ignite Salt Lake 2, Salt Lake City, UT.
• Brabham, D. C. (moderator and panelist), Jeppesen, L. B., Lietsala, K., & Muthukumaraswamy, K. (panelists). (2008, October). Crowdsourcing: The growing influence of crowds in business, journalism, entertainment, and problem solving. Roundtable panel presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Brabham, D. C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: An introduction and cases. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), 75-90. PDF (152 KB)

Motivations of crowds to participate in crowdsourcing

• Brabham, D. C. (2011). Motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application to improve public engagement in transit planning. Working paper under review for publication.
• Brabham, D. C. (in press). Motivaties voor crowdsourcing [Motivations for crowdsourcing]. In T. Meuleman & R. van Meer (Eds.), De C2B revolutie [The crowd-to-business revolution]. Amsterdam: Lenthe Publishers [published in Dutch].
• Brabham, D. C. (2010). Moving the crowd at Threadless: Motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application. Information, Communication & Society, 13(8), 1122-1145. PDF (155 KB)
• Brabham, D. C. (2009, August). Moving the crowd at Threadless: Motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, Boston, MA.
• Brabham, D. C. (2008). Moving the crowd at iStockphoto: The composition of the crowd and motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application. First Monday, 13(6). Link

Who participates in crowdsourcing?

• Brabham, D. C. (in press). The myth of amateur crowds: A critical discourse analysis of crowdsourcing coverage. Information, Communication & Society. PDF draft for comment (68 KB)
• Brabham, D. C. (2011, October). The myth of amateur crowds: A critical discourse analysis of crowdsourcing coverage. Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, Seattle, WA.
• Brabham, D. C. (2011). The myth of amateur crowds. Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, 13(6). Link
• Brabham, D. C. (2008). Moving the crowd at iStockphoto: The composition of the crowd and motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application. First Monday, 13(6). Link
• Ortiz, E. E., & Brabham, D. C. (2008, July). New media meets organizational communication: Re(de)fining professionalism through online peer collaborations. Position paper presented at Organizational Communication at Alta Revisited: Reflection, Synthesis and Engagement, Snowbird, UT.

Crowdsourcing public participation in governance and planning

• Brabham, D. C. (2011). The effectiveness of crowdsourcing public participation in a planning context. Working paper under review for publication.
• Brabham, D. C. (2010). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: Leveraging the collective intelligence of online communities for public good. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Utah (dir. Joy Pierce).
• Brabham, D. C. (with Sanchez, T. W., & Bartholomew, K.). (2010, March). Integrating previously uninvolved stakeholders in an online public participation program: The Next Stop Design case. Presentation given at the 2010 Stakeholder Engagement Conference, online.
• Brabham, D. C., Sanchez, T. W., & Bartholomew, K. (2010, January). Crowdsourcing public participation in transit planning: Preliminary results from the Next Stop Design case. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, DC.
• Brabham, D. C. (2009). Crowdsourcing the public participation process for planning projects. Planning Theory, 8(3), 242-262. PDF (154 KB)
• Young, C. (moderator), Bregman, S., Litvak, J. F., Wood, J., & Brabham, D. C. (2009, October). New media/new tools. Panel presented at Rail~Volution 2009, Boston, MA.
• Brabham, D. C. (2008, September). Crowdsourcing: A next-generation connection. Presentation given at the fall conference of the Intermountain Chapter of the International Association for Public Participation, Logan, UT.
• Brabham, D. C. (2008, August). Crowdslapping the government: First Amendment protections for the crowd in government crowdsourcing ventures. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, Chicago, IL.
• Brabham, D. C. (2008, June). Crowdsourcing public participation. Presentation given to the Intermountain Chapter of the International Association for Public Participation, via telephone.

Managing crowdsourcing applications

• Brabham, D. C. (2012). Managing unexpected publics online: The challenge of targeting specific groups with the wide-reaching tool of the Internet. International Journal of Communication, 6, 1139-1158. Link
• Brabham, D. C. (2012, January 24). Defining online community management. Culture Digitally [Weblog]. Link
• Brabham, D. C. (2011). The benefits of effective internal crowdsourcing applications. In PR News’ employee communications guidebook (Vol. 3, pp. 53-56). New York: PR News Press.
• Brabham, D. C. (2011, April). Managing unexpected publics online: The challenge of targeting specific groups with the wide-reaching tool of the Internet. Paper presented at the International Public Relations Research Conference, Miami, FL.
• Brabham, D. C. (2011, January). Managing crowdsourcing ventures. Presentation given to the Duke University Master of Engineering Management Program Seminar Series, Durham, NC.
• Brabham, D. C. (2008, August). Crowdslapping the government: First Amendment protections for the crowd in government crowdsourcing ventures. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, Chicago, IL.

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Other folks studying crowdsourcing and related phenomena from a variety of angles

Jeff Howe
Lars Bo Jeppesen
Karim Lakhani
Sarah Otner
Maja Vukovic