Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the increasing trend of crowd-sourcing. Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, recently wrote:
"Many of the tools driving the convergence of physical and digital domains will also drive the evolution of 'economy of engagement'. In this economy, it is less important to compete for attention and more important to compete for brain cycles and interactive bandwidth."
The idea that there is wisdom in crowds is undoubtedly true, but the cognitive dissonance that I have with it is in figuring out how to leverage this magnitude of wealth for something more than eyeballs. The valuation of the notion that there is wisdom in crowds has never been so prevalent than with the popular crowd-sourced site, Wikipedia. But I struggle to find more examples like this. It has been calculated that it would take 100 million brain hours to replicate an English-only version of Wikipedia. More and more people are now engaging in different forms of social networking, and generating outward expressions of themselves through the web, because the barrier to entry is getting lower and lower. Twitter only accepts up to 140 characters, while automatic photo feeds require literally no interaction time to update a photo stream to
Flickr. So yes, while more people than ever are engaging in social networks, how many true brain hours are actually being spent on them? I would posit that very little time is required to participate in many of the social networks today.
Looking at the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people, we can see that there is a cognitive dissonance here. The 80-20 rule is what will kill crowd-sourcing. The idea with crowd sourcing is that value will only come from the contribution of many. The problem is that the majority of people who visit crowd-sourcing sites generally only observe or comment at best. But the actual numbers of those who will spend adequate mind share on someone else's crowd-sourced problem is very low. How much free time do people actually have in a day to work on someone else's problem?
Crowd-sourcing only works when you are able to turn attention into engagement. Lets look at the downfall
of the highly touted Silicon Valley startup. Cambrian House had a differentiated business model - they would give small percentages of equity to those who contributed their brain power to others' ideas. The concept was supposed to revolutionize Silicon Valley - but it failed completely. Tons of people participated, but in the end the tons of people were doing only one of three things:
1. starting their own idea
2. passively observing others ideas
3. commenting on people's ideas
None of which is going to produce great outcomes.
Another open model that has been gaining popularity has been the recent influx in prize-based awards. There are more than 30,000 significant prizes awarded annually, collectively worth $1 billion dollars.
Organizations such as Innocentive and other prize based design competitions such as the X-Prize and MacArthur Foundation's Fellows Program are all doing their part to funnel individuals' brainpower to solving the world's most complex problems.
The problem with all of this is that no one is actively contributing to the further development of anyone else's ideas. With Wikipedia-sized ideas needing 100 million hours, I would say we are a long way away from leveraging the wisdom of crowds.
Further reading:
Tech Crunch: When Crowdsourcing Fail
Wall Street Journal: The Science Prize: Innovation or Stealth Advertising?
