Stories of the value of “crowdsourcing” (opening your content, code, information to the creative (and destructive) moods of the masses) are fairly common. Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing:
From around the world, almost 20,000 people chipped in on a five-minute animated film that features a love story between a guitar and a violin. You could have been one of them. All you needed was a Facebook account and an itch for computer-generated animation. The Mass Animation project, led by Yair Landau, is showing how much further crowdsourcing can go, and how traditional production methods may get left behind.
Crowdsourcing, as with any activity that pulls on and requires attention is subject to network phenomenon. Which means some initiatives will get lots of love and others will languish. In an ideal world, we would have many small dedicated projects carefully attended to by a passionate core. LTC released software used for developing our Virtual Learning Commons. The masses didn’t come to improve the software. I think this is more frequently the case than projects that succeed in gaining numerous contributors. That’s why we don’t hear much about competitors to Wikipedia. Divergent attention and effort could possibly diminish the value of all projects. Does this mean crowdsourcing reduces diversity? I’m not sure. Need to think about that more.
One Comment
George – What you are describing sounds a lot like tournament theory in economics: http://tournamenttheory.org/
In short – winner takes all. Similar ideas are expressed in “The Long Tail”. I agree that most crowdsourcing efforts will not be blockbusters. But that’s only a problem if we design them so that they require blockbuster levels of attention before they deliver value.
There are other options…