Although we’ve been dealing with a lot of Web 2.0 phenomena so far in class – particularly blogging and micro-blogging – but I can’t help myself from jumping a bit a head in the syllabus and talk about the crowdsourcing technique used by The Guardian. I always found it reassuring that crowdsourcing somewhat undermines this notion that meaningful work only comes from a meaningful wallet. Juxtaposed to this slightly rosier first impression of crowdsourcing, I do find this idea of crowdsourcing to be a bit “lazy” on the part of The Guardian, at least in the traditional “you couldn’t just do it yourselves?” sort of way. But I guess what ultimately worked for me as a kid to get me to do my chore also applies to crowdsourcers – make a chore into a game, or at least something enjoyable with manageable tasks and rewards.
The power of the collective as a cheap, and surprisingly effective, model is really intriguing. I’ve decided to blog a bit more about my professional background and interests. For a short time, I used to work for an IT consultancy. Although a lowly analyst, I was always impressed the way the firm employed “Web 2.0 inspired” approaches to effectively manage its most important resource – knowledge. For instance, we employed an internal document management system that resembled the basic idea behind crowdsourcing in that it leveraged employees to sort through and categorize thousands of files. They used short, and fun, games to interface with the sorting script, so the “chore” was more like a game, at least ostensibly. However, unlike The Guardian, the pool of crowdsourcers is relatively homogeneous – consultants – and the pool of crowdsourcers were being paid for their services. I do take issue with my later point because my firm was client billable, that is to say your hours worked came from specific client projects and rarely internal tasks. My coworkers crowdsourced, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Much like The Guardian case, it was a skill and you were rewarded as you went along, without requiring to a monetary payoff. It gave a sense of accomplishment, a series of incremental victories to pat the ego.
I often wonder if this sense of accomplishment is what drives this phenomenon. Granted, these tasks can be mind-numbing if you spend enough hours in front of a computer, diluting this sense of accomplishment if there were no real engagement or struggle. However, I think there’s something bigger going on here that goes beyond games and rewards. Projecting how current technologies or techniques will pan-out in the future is always a message business. I doubt The Guardian had a sense that this technique would level the playing field with its competitors. Nevertheless, this incentive based structure could potentially alter how we do work. Could we potentially even rethink our entire incentive structure? The Guardian took full advantage of this. I wonder how, or even if, we will? How about we crowdsource the answer and find out?
