Crowdsourcing : What, When, Where and How?

Fri Apr 17 22:39:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Say you be an individual, small business owner or big corporate, everyday you face tasks which are not very efficient for you or your current team to perform. Some of them just need bare minimum human intelligence for limited time like data entry or Googling contact details or company details etc. You do not need an engineer or analyst for this; all you need is someone with cognition and common sense. These tasks are not big enough to create a new job in the market but not small enough for any smart movers to ignore them. This is a long existing problem for every employer. Traditionally the path, which has been followed, has also become reasons for employers not to follow them in bad market conditions. In such cases generally exercised options are:

None of these are best options anymore, as 30 days one-person job can be finished in hours, at the price of hours by using the best of the options available on the Internet. Fiber optics has made this world flatter and all aware individuals should know how to take best advantage of it.

If laborious, repetitive, time-consuming not very skillful jobs are holding back your pace then you should crowd source. So lets see the definition first, Wikipedia defines Crowdsourcing as:

Crowdsourcing is a neologism (new word, not in common use) for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. **

There are many kinds of Crowdsourcing, based on domains in which they are performed and also on the kind of rewards given to the crowd. Crowdsourcing where a job is posted on online platform and the money is distributed to every individual for completing the task separately is picking up in big way. Crowd sourcing platform provides abilities for a job requester to break his job into smaller tasks and also acts as home to the crowd who eventually will finish the job.

How it works?

Imagine a professional faced with a challenge of marketing himself before he can create brand equity for someone else. He wants to send personalized mailer to companies in his interest area by applying for right job openings to the right guy. Getting the list of companies is not an issue but the problem lies in looking up the individual website, finding the job and getting the email address to apply to. He is a smart mover and decides to crowd source his list of 1000 companies; Crowdsourcing platform breaks his list of 1000 into single independent tasks and sets the expectation from his each task

He pays 10 cents for each job (Hold the horses) and can get his work done in matter of hours once the hundreds of volunteers on the platform start doing his tasks one by one in parallel. At a price of 100$ he get the information which could have taken him weeks to find. Individuals and companies can get their work done cheaply and quickly using this technique and all they need is to break their jobs creatively.

Who is this Crowd?

Housewives, students, unemployed, self-employed, disabled, aged, time passers and "work-earn from home" are the kind of people, who makeup online crowd. I asked to hold your horses at the time of putting price of 10 cents on the job and reason is simple, no one can hold person in captivity and give reasonably good internet connection to work on Crowdsourcing sweat shop. Pricing is for job provider to choose. If he selects bad pricing and expect more to be done then his tasks will lie unfinished. If member of crowd find a task to be worthy enough of the price he/she will pick it up. Certainly 10 cent is not price, which suits the professionals, or people living in developed countries but across the globe many people will take up a task, which they can finish it in minutes and can finish 100 of such tasks in a day working from their homes.

Where is Crowdsourcing Marketplace?

There are many companies, which provide software platforms to setup online Crowdsourcing marketplaces. But setting up your own Crowdsourcing marketplace is certainly not a viable option for everyone, as it has huge setup cost and it has to be publicized to gather the crowd. I will recommend job providers and workers to use platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk.com). This is pioneer in crowdsourcing field and well established too. Join as Mechanical Turk Requester, place your task, put a cost to it and pay to the workers once you are satisfied with work.

Whenever a worker accepts your hit (Human Intelligence Tasks) he has to finish it in awarded time and submit it on the completion. Once HIT is verified money can be released from your account. mTurk will act as an arbitrary in case of dispute. The workers get paid once they have reached certain amount and payments can be done via Pay Pal, Western Union or directly to the bank account of Indian and US workers.

Sometimes jobs are complex and need some prequalification from the workers. Mechanical Turk provides the facility for requester to setup such tests and qualify the workers for tasks. These are better priced tasks like of medical transcription. Moreover crowd-sourcing platforms are evolving and in coming years they will become more mature to handle even more complex Crowdsourcing tasks.

Crowdsourcing Vs. Outsourcing

Crowdsourcing is around long enough to be recognized by its own name. But for those who have not heard it many times, I must say that it is far apart from outsourcing. Outsourcing firms are bound with legal contracts and bonds but in Crowdsourcing you are dealing with individuals, which are beyond the reach of any applicable law. The outsourcing partner hires employees and they get the job done for you. But in Crowdsourcing job is divided in many smaller tasks and then given to the crowd with an open call based on first come first serve and payment on approval bases. Crowd is on no ones payrolls; they are like unknown numbers of freelances working for you at many different locations, at different time zones. There is no minimum wage criterion for getting you job done which is bad also. If crowd likes the task on your offered price they will do it, else someone else will or you have to push up the price.

In nutshell, Crowdsourcing is something, which no business should ignore today. If you are not ready for it now then better prepare yourself as your competitors are already reaping the benefits of it.

Note:

There has been some hue and cry about the word "crowd sourcing" itself. Some believe it to be not a right kind of word but I have kept this blog away form that discussion.

There are many kinds of Crowdsourcing based on domains in which they are performed and on the basis of rewards distributed to the crowd. When a pharmaceutical company challenges his scientists with the best R&D suggestion and get rewarded with 50000$, that is one type of Crowdsourcing. Techies joining together to create open source software, with recognition as their reward, are also examples of Crowdsourcing. When many individuals report on news from different parts of world bound as a community of reporters its called Crowdsourcing in journalism etc.

Reference: ** Wikipedia on Crowdsourcing

Posted at 10:39PM Apr 17, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[1]