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I’ve just been forwarded a link to this BLOG post on Read Write Web about crowd sourcing. The technology hasn’t been developed for public policy YET, but it looks to have relevance for the future of online community engagement. Read on… or click on the title to go to the original post.
Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One
Written by Josh Catone / March 22, 2007 12:48 PM /
The “wisdom of crowds” is a popular web 2.0 buzzword, popularized by James Surowiecki’Äôs book of the same name. At its most basic, the term means that two heads are better than one, and that still more heads will yield even better results.
The wisdom of crowds is all around us these days. Wikipedia is one of the best known examples of the concept at work. Thousands of Wikipedia users have created an encyclopedia that studies have shown is as accurate as traditional volumes like Britannica. Another well-known project is theYahoo! Buzz Game, which is a prediction market for “high-tech products, concepts, and trends.” Their memetracker market, for example, has predicted the state of the market in line with Alexa data. Note: Read/WriteWeb covered a Yahoo! event about prediction markets here.
Perhaps the best exponent so far of Web ‘wisdom of crowds’ is Google, which organizes websites based on how they link to each other. Google sees links as votes for the relevance of a page. It is of course more complicated than that, but one can make the argument that Google works by utilizing the wisdom of crowds to determine which websites are the most relevant.
Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. The official definition from the term’Äôs originator, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”
Crowdsourcing can be broken down in to three categories:
- creation (like Wikipedia);
- prediction (like Yahoo! Buzz); and
- organization (like Google).
This work by Bang the Table Pty Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.
