Crowdsourcing For Dummies

David Alan Grier

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781119943853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Give your business the edge with crowd-power!

Crowdsourcing is an innovative way of outsourcing tasks, problems or requests to a group or community online. There are lots of ways business can use crowdsourcing to their advantage: be it crowdsourcing product ideas and development, design tasks, market research, testing, capturing or analyzing data, and even raising funds. It offers access to a wide pool of talent and ideas, and is an exciting way to engage the public with your business.

Crowdsourcing For Dummies is your plain-English guide to making crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation work for you. It gives step-by-step advice on how to plan, start and manage a crowdsourcing project, where to crowdsource, how to find the perfect audience, how best to motivate your crowd, and tips for troubleshooting.

Part I

Understanding Crowdsourcing Basics

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part . . .

Bone up on the basics and benefits of crowdsourcing to see what it could do for you and your organisation.

Meet the five different types of crowdsourcing and understand the rules that govern how they operate.

See the inside view on crowdsourcing and gain valuable experience by becoming a working member of the crowd.

Enjoy working in the crowd? Fancy joining a crowdmarket? Want to consider the options open to you? Get the lowdown here on crowdsourcing careers.

Chapter 1

People Power: Getting a Feel for Crowdsourcing

In This Chapter

Understanding the basics of crowdsourcing

Seeing the benefits of crowdsourcing

Joining the crowd as a crowdworker

Following the steps to being a crowdsourcer

You’ve probably heard about crowdsourcing. If you haven’t, you probably won’t be leafing through the pages of this book. However, you may not be aware of the many ways in which you can use crowdsourcing to your advantage or of how crowdsourcing is a powerful way of doing work, organising people, gathering information and raising money.

Many people – the unconverted – think that crowdsourcing is nothing more than putting a question on Facebook and waiting for your friends to answer. Yet it’s much more than that – and much more powerful.

I can think of no better example of the power of crowdsourcing than what it has done to the encyclopaedia. Putting together an encyclopaedia was once a grand scholarly activity to organise the knowledge of a nation. The French created the first in the 18th century. The British followed with Encyclopaedia Britannica in the nineteenth, and the Americans with the Encyclopaedia Americana in the twentieth. Now, in the 21st century, they’ve all been replaced with a crowdsourced encyclopaedia: Wikipedia. Just think about what crowdsourcing could do for you.

In this chapter, I introduce you to crowdsourcing – how it works, the benefits it offers and how you can think about organising the crowd to help you – and the areas that I cover in this book.

What Is This Thing Called Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is a means of organising and coordinating the labour of individual human beings. You use the Internet and computer software to contact individuals, offer them things to do, and collect the results of their work.

Seeing how crowdsourcing works

Crowdsourcing requires four different elements:

A person, usually called the crowdsourcer, who manages the process

A group of people, called the crowd, who do work

A market, usually called the crowdmarket, that’s used to help manage the contributions of the crowd (crowdmarkets are often found on Internet sites that are called crowdsites or platforms)

A means of communicating with the crowd – usually the Internet

Strictly speaking, you can crowdsource without the Internet. You need to have only the crowdsourcer, the crowd and the crowdmarket. However, you can raise a larger crowd most easily if you use the Internet. The Internet reduces the isolation caused by geography and allows you to contact more people, who may have a wider range of skills.

To crowdsource, you put a request on a crowdmarket. You ask for a piece of information, an idea for a new product, a little bit of work, a large task or even a contribution. In return, you offer some kind of compensation. You pay for the worker’s services with money, or you offer him gratitude, or give him a gift, or offer him membership in a community.

Just because you may not use conventional money in the transactions doesn’t mean that you have no crowdmarket. Even when they’re volunteers, workers receive something in the transaction. They get satisfaction from using their skills, pleasure at being part of a group, or a sense of meaning from contributing to something bigger than themselves.

In one of the most well-known examples of crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, almost all the workers are volunteers and work for no payment. Yet they’re part of an exchange at a market. They offer their contributions to the Wikipedia encyclopaedia and receive no money in compensation for their efforts, even if their words becomes a fixture in the encyclopaedia. Still, each person feels some kind of satisfaction at contributing to the well-used compendium of human knowledge.

Looking at crowdsourcing forms

Crowdsourcing can take many different forms. You can do it with large groups of people or small teams, or even with individuals. You can crowdsource with people who live near to you or those who live and work on the other side of the planet. With crowdsourcing, you can engage the creativity and intellectual powers of individuals, or you can engage their physical labour, or you can ask for money.

To understand the nature of crowdsourcing and all that it can do, consider the following examples. I indicate the type of crowdsourcing used in each example; for an overview, take a look at Chapter 2.

Creating the best design: You’re preparing an annual report for your organisation. You’ve written all the text you need but you want it organised with a nice graphic design. You post on a crowdsite or platform a request for proposals for a design for your report. The crowd members submit proposals. You choose the one that best suits your needs and compensate the individual who created it. This form of crowdsourcing is called a crowdcontest (see Chapter 5 for more).

Getting a little help with editing: Every now and then, you write a small article for a professional periodical. You know that your articles would be better if someone edited them. You don’t have enough work to hire a professional editor, and so you post a request on a crowdsite for an editor. You find one who meets your needs and hire him to do your editing. This type of crowdsourcing is called macrotasking (flick to Chapter 7 for more).

Setting up a new blog: You need a new blog for your organisation but you don’t know how to set up the software. You also need a few special things that aren’t usually part of standard blogging software. You describe what you need, post the details on a crowdmarket and ask for bids, and then you choose the ones that best meet your need. This process is called macrotasking (the subject of Chapter 7).

Gathering contact details: You’re the marketing manager for a small company and have just been given a list of 10,000 companies that might be potential clients. This list includes no contact information. To get the email address and URL for ea...