The Future of Crowdsourcing
As we mentioned in our previous discussion, the idea of crowdsourcing has been adopted by more and more organizations. As the “crowd”, we also get familiar with this idea and become more involved in contributing our resources, either by volunteering or for benefits. We may wonder, what is the future of crowdsourcing?
We introduced crowdsourcing in the scope of outsourcing, and we believe the essential of crowdsourcing is the same. The reason crowdsourcing becomes a buzzword is because it also introduces open innovation. With our exploration, we believe in the future, crowdsourcing will evolve in two dimensions. Horizontally, the business process of crowdsourcing will be segmented into sub-tasks. For every sub-task, professional organizations will occupy the market. Vertically, crowdsourcing will be applied into different fields of business, which means the requirement of input and output of a crowdsourcing task will be strictly defined and the overall quality of the final output will be improved.
Horizontal Evolvement:
The following life cycle can be applied to a typical crowdsourcing task.
1. An issue is identified;
2. Potential solutions to the problem are developed;
3. The best solution is further developed through micro-tasks by the crowd;
4. The crowd funds the final solution;
5. The solution is implemented using the crowd as a delivery mechanism;
6. The final solution is validated through social media sentiment analysis.
Vertical Evolvement:
Crowdsourcing will be introduced into business that requires different level of expertise:
1. Unconscious Behavior: where the outsourcing tasks are done unconsciously as part of other tasks.
2. Common Knowledge: where tasks require basic knowledge, like voting and labeling.
3. Required Satisfaction: where requirements are specified and only tasks meeting the requirements can get the benefit.
4. Professional and Experts: where tasks require domain knowledge and usually the tasks are presented in a contest format.
Upcoming Problems:
However, when the idea of crowdsourcing blooms, the problems also occur. Crowdsourcing’s resource is based on crowd, which determines its unavoidable characteristics of the crowd: need for motivation, unpredicted respondents, uncontrollable quality and limited professional resources.
1. Need for motivation: Though implicit crowdsourcing has set a model to collect users’ output without letting them know, creating such a model is difficult and usually a by-product of other application. Usually, companies would like motivating the target users with wages or prize. Yet report says most crowd workers receive minimal wages. The prize is awarded to a few and sometimes less than crowd workers’ expectation.
2. Unpredicted respondents and uncontrollable quality: to reach the large scale of the crowd, organizations usually don’t have resources for organizational management and quality control. Therefore, organizations looking for predicated and stable outcome would rather try in-housing and outsourcing development. Crowdsourcing may be a good choice for organizations that are looking for innovative solutions or don’t care about the output quality.
3. Limited professional resources: the more crowdsourcing agencies yield a diminishing return when they require professional resources. An example will be crowd funding website like Kickstarter. Now individuals may be able to find large amount of funding, however, when there are more agencies out on the market and more people realize it is a good approach to seek initial funding, the funding source will be separated and streamed into smaller amount. The same thing can happen on contests requiring skills such as machining learning since the talent pool is limited.
Reference:
[1]: The Future of Crowdsourcing, Dustin Haisler, https://medium.com/p/67ee31b88b5b
[2]: The Future of Crowd Work, Aniket Kittur, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael S. Bernstein, http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2013/CrowdWork/futureofcrowdwork-cscw2013