The best thing about SXSW is the people – as there’s some really very smart people to learn from. Here’s 7 things learnt from @scottbelsky (founder of the Behance community) and @Jeffrey (UX director at Digg) about crowd-sourcing:
1) Jeff Howe coined the word “Crowd-sourcing” in 2006
2) Businesses have crowd-sourced 3 different things: 1) wisdom (e.g. Wikipedia) 2) Labour (e.g. Mechanical Turk) 3) Wisdom and labour (e.g. Digg or Threadless)
3) “With crowds, sourcing exists in sprints” – the idea that you need to keep up a high-level of participation over time leads to crowd-fatigue
4) “Sustainability exists inherently in the organic, adaptive nature of communities” When applied to a brand, this means that if the business disappears, the brand continues as the community continues e.g. Harley Davidson would continue even if it went bankrupt
5) The risks that could make crowd-sourcing a short-lived phenomenon?
- “Discount sushi” – it seemed like a good idea at the time . . .
- Football team vs the strip club – i.e. different organisational types. Football is a team game, whereas strippers are individuals (so crowdsourcing / sharing ideas for success isn’t going to work in communities of Strippers)
- Careless engagement: if your engagement in no way benefits or harms your reputation, then why take part?
- Wasted nerons: the fact that so many ideas are never used or taken into account. Intellectual wastage.
- No contextual reputation: it’s a level reputation – every one’s got a chance. Example of a world-renowned designer getting their design rejected as being too bad by Threadless.
6) The 3 questions we should all ask of any sourcing activity?
- Can it foster a community?
e.g. is there and incentive for conversation and learning? Is there an incentive to engage beyond a specific transaction? Is there a culture of collaboration?
- Does it tap collective wisdom?
e.g. if, in gaining opinion / insight, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?
- Does it nurture participants?
e.g. does the work benefit reputation? Does it build relationships? Are resources wasted?
