Over the past four years, this topic has grown immensely. It is
amazing to see how large organizations use crowdsourcing to gain competitive
advantages in their industries.
An article that I found extremely interesting is 6 COOL CROWDSOURCING
BUSINESS TOOLS.
One of the points it touches on is on-demand transcription. This
is a service that is growing and being used more and more. The article talks
about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is also covered in our course reading Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk by Mason and Suri (2011). Mason and Suri touch on some of
the aspects of using the web for behavioral research and the benefits including
easier access to a larger diversified pool and lower costs of experimentation.
Time is a huge advantage of these tools as well. CastingWords, an on-demand
transcription service, uses Mechanical Turk to pay people to transcribe
segments of audio with a turn around time of 24 hours. It’s amazing what can be
done, for less pay, and less time, using the web.
Although this may seem like sunshine and rainbows, there are
always disadvantages to process as well. One of the fallbacks of crowdsourcing
I noticed is the quality of work you are receiving and the accountability of
the people doing the work for you.
I am interested to hear what other limitations do you notice, or
have experienced with crowdsourcing?
References:
Mason, W and Suri, S. (2011). Conducting behavioral research
on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2011.
Howe, J. (2006). The rise of
crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine, 14, 1–4.
6 Cool Crowdsourcing Business Tools.
(n.d.) Retrieved July 14, 2015, from
http://www.inc.com/ss/how-use-crowdsourcing-business.
One of the more interesting sides to crowdfunding that I have seen is how the crowd reacts when the effort fails. On sites like KickStarter.com for example, it used to be that if your project failed to produce, the person / entity that started the campaign didn't have to pay any of the money back. Contributors were (rightfully) upset about it and sites like it and gofundme.com have had to change their policies about what happens when a project gets successfully funded, but fail to deliver on their product / service. There was a lawsuit a few months back, but I can't find the link now, that caused a huge ruckus, and now, new crowdsourcing sites have slowed in proliferation in response to the new legislation. Certainly an interesting topic to watch. Thanks for bringing it up!
ReplyDeleteGreat point! I wonder what happens if that is the case and a project fails. I would be equally as upset if I donated to a project that failed and my money was kept for other things other than what I had intended.
ReplyDeleteI found that crowdsourcing is good to use in simulating creativity than in practical action, which involves much more cost and time to administrate quality of the work.
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