Crowdsourcing

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge

by Daren C. Brabham

A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works. Ever since the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006 by Wired writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms have been labeled with this most buzz-generating of media buzzwords. In this accessible but authoritative account, grounded in the empirical literature, Daren Brabham explains what crowdsourcing is, what it is not, and how it works. Crowdsourcing, Brabham tells us, is an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes set forth by a crowdsourcing organization—corporate, government, or volunteer. Uniquely, it combines a bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. Crowdsourcing is not open source production, which lacks the top-down component; it is not a market research survey that offers participants a short list of choices; and it is qualitatively different from predigital open innovation and collaborative production processes, which lacked the speed, reach, rich capability, and lowered barriers to entry enabled by the Internet. Brabham describes the intellectual roots of the idea of crowdsourcing in such concepts as collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and distributed computing. He surveys the major issues in crowdsourcing, including crowd motivation, the misconception of the amateur participant, crowdfunding, and the danger of “crowdsploitation” of volunteer labor, citing real-world examples from Threadless, InnoCentive, and other organizations. And he considers the future of crowdsourcing in both theory and practice, describing its possible roles in journalism, governance, national security, and science and health.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Technology

138 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Daren C. Brabham is Assistant Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Summary:
Part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, this book is an academic overview of crowdsourcing. Daren C. Brabham aims to define crowdsourcing concepts and theories, define four categories of crowdsourcing, and lay out the issues and future potential surrounding this new form of organizing.

Recommended For:
If you want a look at the theory, research, and ethical issues of crowdsourcing, this book will give you that. While it does use a couple examples to help define certain types of crowdsourcing, it does not aim to be a utilitarian book of tips and best practices.

My Experience:
Each topic of this book was covered relatively briefly, and for most of the topics, I'm glad they were short. The book is written in an academic style that wasn't very enjoyable to me, but I did pick up some useful information. For me, the most useful topics were; motivations of crowdsourcing participants, legal and copyright issues, as well as ethical and labor rights issues. I'll likely read more on this topic, but I'll be looking more specifically on those topics and much more on how to effectively use crowdsourcing platforms, which was not covered in this book.

[Cody Perakslis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much of the book serves to outline terms. A shared vocabulary is important, and defining terms helps check we know what we are talking about. It makes sense for this book, but the whole work can benefit from more of a psychological spin.

I was looking more for a guidebook, which this was not. It did bring some thoughts on intrinsic motivation and community sustainment, but this work seemed to be a summarization of other summarizations that were aggregated together.

That being said, the section on Issues in Crowdsourcing was extremely interesting, especially around the myth of the amateur and disruption. I would recommend reading this purely for that section.

The book was underwhelming for the length of it, but I got a better understanding of crowdsourcing from it.

[Iliiaz Akhmedov · Rating 4 out of 5]

How much of this book is "crowdsourced"? 🤔

It's easy to understand crowdsourcing and its emergence with the internet. However, the contribution and rewards balance between the organizer and the crowd is less obvious with a certain goal. Provided the engagement, how would you do this?

I learnt a new word "crowdslapping" which means the crowd rebels to push for certain changes, but I couldn't control my imagination thinking of peoples slapping each other.

[Ben Rochon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, good definition of the concept but the examples makes the book feel dated.

[BCS · Rating 3 out of 5]

The term ‘crowdsourcing’ only entered modern parlance in 2006 when Wired writer Jeff Howe described this new phenomena of online group problem solving. Daren Brabham's book is an in-depth piece of research into what crowdsourcing is and is not. The book is well structured in four separate sections: what is it, how to organise it, issues and futures.

Brabham takes the time to explain his theory of locus of control to help the reader understand what crowdsourcing is. He stresses the importance of mutual benefit and that control must reside between the organisations and community in a shared space. If you see it as a customer / supplier relationship, then you can appreciate that the customer defines the objective and the supplier (the crowd) delivers the results. Therefore open source is not crowdsourcing because the community sets the priorities – there is no top-down management. I found this a really helpful way to understand the interplay between the actors involved in crowdsourcing.

One of the enablers for crowdsourcing is the technology – typically a platform on the internet where the customer posts their requests and the crowd replies. (Remember that this is outsourcing to as yet unknown people – so there is a defined job to be done). The benefits of the online platform include the speed to get the work out there, very low barriers to entry, and the asynchronous nature of the interaction. It did make me wonder if I had a football stadium full of people, could I do some basic crowdsourcing there without an online platform?

One of the other messages that stood out is that the crowd isn't necessarily comprised of amateurs. There are many experienced professionals from diverse fields who contribute to crowdsourcing in addition to their day jobs; others may have retired but want to remain active.

There is also a good discussion of the ethics, business practices and labour rights in the context of crowdsourcing. There is a clear benefit to the customer – for example: the crowd doesn't have union representation.

Brabham uses a limited set of examples repeatedly throughout the book. I'm uncertain if this is because there aren't that many good examples of successful crowdsourcing or his research was limited in scope. I feel that a broader set of examples would have provided even more insight.

I was disappointed that despite all of Brabham's research there was no advice on how to get the best out of crowdsourcing. So in essence this is a piece of academic research that looks at crowdsourcing from its inception until today to get to the core of what it is and is not.

Reviewed by Danny Williams MBCS CITP

[Rajit · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are new to crowdsourcing or have just heard about it here and there, this book is an excellent primer to this new and fascinating way to democratizing certain processes. It is a very quick read and a great resource to have on the shelves in case you want to refer to it from time to time. These are the main things that really stood out to me:

- Crowdsourcing: deliberate blend of bottom-up, open, creative process with top-down organizational goals. However there has to be a good balance of creativity from the bottom and organization from the top. i.e. voting is NOT crowdsourcing. (p. xvi) The interplay between the two parties results in a mutually beneficial outcome that probably would not have existed had the two parties not collaborated. (p. 5)

- Crowdsourcing is different than crowdfunding (which has become popularized through sites such as Kickstarter)

- Crowdsourcing is certainly new as it has been only in the past 20 years or so that a large amount of widespread creativity could be shared via the internet (before there was no medium in which we could do this, though some may suggest that Oxford's Dictionary, etc. are similar forms of crowdsourcing that occurred prior to the internet.)

- We do not fully understand what motivates people to engage in crowdsourcing and this is a field of future research. There are many motivations, but it has been recognized that a combination of triggering both extrinsic (money) and intrinsic (character improvements) motivations are paramount to a successful crowdsourcing campaign.

- There are four types of crowdsourcing approaches based on the type of problem that is being solved: Knowledge management and discovery, broadcast-search, peer-vetted creative production, distributed-human intelligence tasking (p. 45)

- Crowdsourcing will only be as successful as the online community it engages. A more vibrant online community should create better results. At the same time disrupting such online communities can cause a mass exodus and shutdown of a crowdsourcing effort. (p. 89)

- Eventually crowd-sourcing platforms will become normal third party vendors--this is quite obvious but interesting to think about! (p. 101)

I most certainly encourage you to pick up the book and read through it yourself. It is such a quick read and will make you want to read the rest of the MIT Essential Knowledge Series.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although there is some very good information in this book, it is mostly covered in other books that came before it like Jeff Howe's "Crowdsourcing." Also, Brabham redefines crowdsourcing in a number of ways that virtually no one else accepts. By his definition, Wikipedia - the crowning achievement of crowdsourcing efforts - is not actually crowdsourcing because it wasn't organized with hierarchical leadership. Even though I like his limiting crowdsourcing to online activities, the definition continues to go against the definition used by most people and by the person who invented the word (see Howe's work for more on that since he coined the term). If you really want to read something good on crowdsourcing, I recommend Wikinomics.

[Kendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a thin little book that had some decent information on the fledgling research area of crowdsourcing. It did not have a lot on the science-based citizen science endeavors and I thought it spent a little too much time on defining the typology, but I learned some things (How did I not hear about Innocentive before now?!), and foresee quite a bit of work that could be done in this field in the future.

[Desiree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting little technology book! I did learn a lot about crowdsourcing! I had not heard of the companies he mentioned the most, but I did know about Amazon's Mechanical Turk.... A good read for anyone interested in the subject!

[Ilana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent source on crowdsourcing

[amelia]

well, this book sparked a ton of ranting from me, which perhaps makes it useful despite how limited the author's definitions and paradoxical his collections of examples.

[Thorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an introductory book about crowdsourcing. The first chapter is defining the phenomenon, followed by a typology of crowdsourcing in the second chapter. Issues surrounding CS is the focus of the third chapter. Finally the last chapter looks at the future of the CS.