Abstract
” The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always
outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that—but in
doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.”
—From \_Crowdsourcing\_
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article,
” crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be
leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized
few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it's talented, creative,
and stunningly productive. \_Crowdsourcing\_ activates the transformative power
of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a
perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no
longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open
to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service,
design the product, or solve the problem, you've got the job.
But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is
organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made
and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain
and disruption are inevitable.
Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this
intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of
this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the
economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How
were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment
company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly
call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges?
How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a
handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The
answers lie within these pages.
The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer
programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create
better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the
amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of
the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of
otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of
\_Crowdsourcing\_ is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems—a cure for
cancer, for instance—may already exist within the warp and weave of this
infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we
need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved.
The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice.
Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and
principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation
collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of
us can hardly understand. \_Crowdsourcing\_, just now starting to emerge, will
in a short time simply be the way things are done.
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