The Specifics Please

Summary of #KMers Twitter chat May 18, 2010. For details, color, and to see who said what, see the full transcript.

Q1: What does crowdsourcing mean to you?

Capturing the thoughts and insights of a group as a whole. That’s a start to my definition; it needs to be crowdsourced.
knowledge collaboration on a large scale, but have yet to experience in professional environment.
asking a large, public group for help rather than targeting a specific, closed set of people
using the knowledge of many to inform a topic – a well rounded approach
the popular term for ideation and idea management. We believe that many things can be done by many.
methods for effectively tapping into collective Knowledge of a group; can also perform certain functions traditionally done by your org
opening a request to any and all comers for submissions – open innovation is slightly different
“Crowdsourcing” to me has always meant, open to everyone/anyone.
tapping into a large, usually unknown, group of people to develop or execute solutions to a particular problem.
Some have also overlapped open innovation notions with crowdsourcing.
How do you feel that a survey is different from crowdsourcing? When is each better to use?
- depends on how widely you distribute the survey – if posted for broad response, then it is crowdsourcing
- crowdsourcing has all the same pitfalls as surveys with skewed respondents. Even more so if open.
what is the tipping point for successful crowdsourcing is… how many people need to be available to respond?
- the “number” may vary depending on type of request. May need bigger crowd 4 tougher question.

Q2: What are the strengths and weaknesses/pitfalls of crowdsourcing?

Strengths

insights from many
diversity of responses (properly executed and communicated)
allows you to tap resources of which you may be unaware. And, they may have exactly the answer you need.
get a broad input on a specific topic or need. May uncover a lot more than typical problem solving may.
potential breadth of ideas
- The potential breadth of ideas depends heavily on the diversity of the crowd.

Weaknesses

Difficulty of appropriately incentivizing the crowd to participate
- you need to motivate the crowd to respond! What’s the best way to do that?
- Hard to rally and incentivize a “crowd” to respond
- Motivating endusers? Aside from the Netflix prize money, aren’t we relying on philanthropy/curiosity?
- If the ideas are going to make something better that the contributors care about, that is motivation, no?
- Is it fame? Size of network?
- $$. Somehow make it a weighted prize depending on outcome (a wager) and you remove a risk of herd mentality as well
Groups tend to be harder to change opinions of then individuals. How to factor that into use of crowdsourcing?
- herd mentality.
need for broadcast comms to stimulate participation & the fact that many people frame request badly
- Agree – Bruce Karney wrote about how to better frame a request
Outliers may get crushed prematurely when in fact they were the breaktrhough idea.
Risk of the mis-informed-know-it-all misinforming within the crowd.
lessons learned and best practices are often lost. Experience can get lost in the crowd.
Crowdsourcing 4 me is frustrating. I’ve seen others have success w/ it, but haven’t had any of my questions answered that way.
- In running ideation events, you need 2 identify the target audience and focus the topic on something of interest to garner attention
Not always useful. May approximate a response in insufficient detail to act. May not pull in the desired experts.
how do we split problems well suited to crowdsourcing (maybe netflix algorithm) from those that are not (medical diagnosis)?
- With regards to Netflix, I was specifically pointing to their $1 million context for crowdsorucing a better recommendation algorithm
- NFLX, there were a lot of concerns about IP from submitters that were unresolved and they were accused of moving the goalposts
understanding the types of solutions and needs is essential up front. Who will review & decide is difficult part
- Perhaps. But it could also lead to a raft of new jobs for people doing things people id as needed.