Book review: Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
My Rating: 7/10
If you have read Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Crowdsourcing is a good book and provides plenty of background and detailed explanations around some of the well known “crowdsourced” companies such as threadless.com, topcoder.com, istockphoto.com, and a few others.
The basic concepts are as follows:
- There are 1 billion Internet users with anywhere between 2 to 6 hours to spend per day;
- There is a large portion of the population that is over-qualified for their day job and as such are looking for ways to use their skills;
- Combine these facts with a drastic decrease of the cost of technology and increased power of technology and the possibilities are endless;
- Most importantly ‘amateurs’ can now compete on the same ground as professionals in many fields;
- As an organization, you cannot control what the crowd will do – the crowd decides what it will work on. The community will work on project of their interest;
- You should start a crowdsourcing project with the intend to make money BUT you may end up making money as a consequence of collaborating with the crowd.
Overall, we are only seeing the beginning of crowdsourcing.
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