What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing refers to the practice of a company or organization to outsource the tasks performed by employees in the past in a free and voluntary manner to unspecified (and usually large) mass volunteers . (It is to do research on product development needs through the Internet, starting from the user's real experience). Crowdsourcing tasks are usually undertaken by individuals , but if it involves tasks that require collaboration among multiple people, it may also take the form of individual production that relies on open source. In the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, the journalist Jeff Howe introduced the concept of crowdsourcing for the first time. However, from the time of submission, the crowdsourcing proposed by Americans is later than the freelancer born in China in 2005. For a year.

Crowdsourcing

(Internet concept)

Distinction from "outsourcing"

As globalization advances,

Crowdsourcing can help companies save a lot of money. The company that grew up with the Internet tide has been in

Who is embracing the crowdsourcing revolution

Amazon: The online retail giant has launched Mechanical Turk (Beta version), a platform that provides crowdsourcing services. Enterprise users are aimed at companies that need to outsource simple computing tasks for a few cents, and individual users will get Small pay.

OhMyNews: The well-known Korean "mass media" has 700,000 readers and 41,000 reporters.

Peugeot: Hold a Peugeot Design Competition to motivate people to design their dream car. The award-winning work of Moovie in 2005 came from a 23-year-old Portuguese student.

BMW: BMW has opened a Customer Innovation Lab in Germany to provide users with online tools to help them participate in the design of BMW cars. A similar approach is the virtual laboratory opened by Audi between 2001 and 2004.

Lego: This well-loved toy company has always encouraged and funded users to participate in various design tasks of the company, from robotic control systems to building block products.

Marketocracy: A community providing financial services, with 60,000 online stock traders, tracking the top 100 stocks and providing investment strategy references. In the past 17 quarters, 11 quarters of the index have outperformed S & P .

IKEA: By holding a "genius design" contest to attract customers to participate in the design of multimedia home solutions, the winners will receive a reward of 2,500 euros, and their works will be put into production and the market.

Adidas: Adidas fans not only processed their own running shoes, but also sold them on eBay.

L'Oreal: The world's largest cosmetics empire recently launched an event to allow users to participate in L'Oreal's advertising design. A similar approach has also been adopted by companies such as McDonald's and Mastercard.

Tate Britain: This museum has a wealth of art works from 1500 to 2000, allowing visitors to write explanations for the exhibits themselves. The selected ones will be displayed next to the masterpieces of fine art.

Social Production in a Network Society

In the past ten years, people around the world have shown an unprecedented social behavior: people come together to complete tasks, and some people even take nothing; these tasks were once performed by employees in a certain professional field. Simply put, "crowdsourcing is social production." The emergence of crowdsourcing began with open source software. The development of the Linux operating system proves that a group of like-minded people can create better products than commercial giants such as Microsoft. Digital immigration and digital aborigines in a networked society

The concept of "digital immigration and digital indigenous people" was first proposed by Mark Prensky in 2002.

"Digital Aborigines" refers to the generation that has lived on the "Internet" since birth; "Digital Immigrants" refers to the generation that has only begun to contact the Internet since adulthood. Digital immigrants may instinctively resist change, while digital aborigines have grown up under the influence of social media. They have been online for a long time, taken photos with mobile phones, and watched games and movies. Although they live on the "same planet" as digital immigrants, they live in In a different world. They can do many things at the same time, and they can work with people who have never met before. The most important thing is that the enthusiasm of the past generations for consuming media has become the enthusiasm for creating media. This is the generation of crowdsourcing, and they are fully capable of adapting to the future of online communities replacing traditional companies; this revolution will be initiated by children.

Don't ask the public what they can do for you, ask yourself what they can do for the public. Most operators of Internet 2.0 have realized that successful public participation is the highest level of the online version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Theory: respect and self-actualization. People in society always need to meet some psychological, social or emotional needs. If these needs are not met, they will not participate. This means that companies must change their mindset in general employment relationships. If iStockPhoto builds its community to create cheap amateur photographer labor, it may fail. Fortunately, the original intention of the founder Livingstone was to create an online home, where enthusiastic people can share their work and give advice to other people's works; of course, they may also earn a few dollars.

Mass amateurization

Crowdsourcing is rooted in an egalitarian principle: everyone has knowledge or talent that is valuable to others. Crowdsourcing serves as a bridge between "I" and "others." Everyone has their own traits, and each "I" is at the center of crowdsourcing. This is not the habit of human society in the 20th century. Nature creates the uniqueness of individual human beings. When this uniqueness exists in a large group of people, it constitutes diversity.

On the other hand, a group is defined as "a group of people who are united by common characteristics." If there are too many points in common, collective intelligence will be weakened; the active level of collective intelligence is proportional to the degree of diversity of a group of people and the ability of people to express their personal opinions. In order for diversity to overcome Superman abilities, certain qualifications must be met. First, this problem must be really difficult to solve. Second, the public must have the ability to solve problems at any time. Finally, participants must come from a talent pool large enough to ensure that various methods are available. In addition, their ability to express their personalities (that is, their local "tacit knowledge") must not be compromised. The wisdom of the community is therefore better than the smartest of them.

Virtual organizations are both companies and communities

The "next society" that management guru Drucker considers is "a knowledge society as well as an organization society, because knowledge can have utility only through organized practice. Moreover, companies in this knowledge society are more like A socialized and networked non-profit organization. "The practice of crowdsourcing validates Drucker's vision more than 20 years ago: First, the crowdsourced knowledge organization is also an academic institution. Also as early as 1983, Richard Stallman, a computer expert at MIT, decided to declare war on the software industry pioneered by Gates alone, and he also defined the "professional group" for the vague preferences of hacker groups. "This was the first shot of the Great Revolution, but hardly anyone heard it at the time." The second is the theme of this section: Organizations are more like NGOs and communities than companies. Don't take it for granted that the corporate system is the best mode of production for human beings. Management master Charles Handy also believes that "corporate system is just a mode of production chosen by human society for nearly 150 years."

A famous example is the VISA credit card: the world's largest company is actually a virtual company. Dee Hawke, the founder and CEO of VISA, was named one of the "Big Eight People Who Can Change the Lifestyle of People in the Past 25 Years" by Money Magazine in 1992. His extraordinary business ideas made VISA a virtual enterprise owned by all credit card holders. Dee believes that business and money are not the entirety of people's lives; they should try their best to eliminate the internal hierarchy of the enterprise; the enterprise should co-operate and own with the users; establish a business ecosystem; use the Oriental holism, not the Western restoration Think about business; study the science of complexity in virtual organizations, and so on. I wonder if it is a coincidence. VISA was founded in 1969 and was born in the same year as the Internet!

A more equal and open business culture

Equal creator. "Crowdsourcing" is in opposition to Fordism, which represents the spirit of the assembly line that dominates the industrial age. Crowdsourcing provides a hypothesis: we are all creators-artists, scientists, architects, designers ... or their combination. It brings hope, explores new ways of creative expression, and unleashes the potential that everyone can pursue excellence in more than one profession. The potential contained in crowdsourcing is, in other words, a threat. It provides a way of thinking for a profession, just as in the industrial era, when the handmade products-large-scale personalization on the Internet-became possible.

Social people, not business people. Another cultural change is that each of us is emotionally no longer narrowly belonging to the corporate person of a certain company, but has become a social person belonging to the entire industry-professional people are social people. Drucker again said that "the company is also a socio-political institution"-the basis for managers' decisions is not "what is right" but "what is acceptable to the company". Managers can neither make decisions that sacrifice the company's interests nor do things that harm consumers. This is a moral self-judgment, as well as emotionally.

By-products of overeducation. A new problem facing the middle class in the West is too much education. According to the statistics of the American College Board, "Since 1940, the proportion of the population who completed four or more years of college education at the age of 25 to 29 has quadrupled." This is also a good thing. Education is the engine that propels the information economy forward. From financial services to marketing, it meets growing demand. Although the trend is to make students tend to obtain degrees such as engineering, business, communications, etc. that can make a living as quickly as possible, it can be seen that elective courses account for more than half of college students' courses. Therefore, "even the most dedicated business school students may fall in love with art and history; even the most dedicated anthropological students may develop a love for meteorology", and students may learn photography or podcasts during class And other skills, but quickly apply what they have learned to life. Started as an elective, gradually became interested, and became a side job after graduation. Especially if you can easily find many like-minded people on BBS and interact with each other, this possibility is even greater. Crowdsourcing takes advantage of the fact that our interests are more diverse than the reveries of business cards.

Consumer innovation power. In 2005, Rick von Schiebel, leader of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, published "Democratic Innovation" to discuss how consumers slowly gain the right to innovation-production. Power also determines the power allocated (Lin Yongqing)-"Innovative users can make what they really want, rather than let the manufacturer do it for them (most of the time is not satisfactory). Feng · Hebel wrote. Crowdsourcing does not have a fixed set of rules, and sometimes the best strategy is to use talented improvisation and innovation.

Crowdsourcing also needs leaders. One of the misconceptions about crowdsourcing is that the public works separately. In fact, the most successful crowdsourcing is done by the public and some of the people who guide them. These people are called "kind dictators" in open source software. In 2006, computer scientist Geron Lanier published an article in the online magazine The Edge called Digital Maoism. He has some brilliant conclusions-"In every instance of collective intelligence I know (using), there are individuals who are well-intentioned, who guide and inspire the masses. These people focus on the collective, in In some applications, they have also corrected the mistakes made by others. "In other words, just like Linus Tovaz's role in the open source software project Linux, we need some decision makers and the community needs leaders.