Austrica

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
George Orwell

Let’s go back 100 years to the ‘typical rural village’.

Everyone in the village helped each other out. One person would slaughter an animal and would share it with their neighbours. This donation was really an informal contract, since the group and the families that gave away the meat would also receive their share when the next animal was slaughtered in the village. A century ago, this was the most efficient way to have fresh meat and minimal spoilage.

This is a simple example of bartering and the informal business systems that existed back then.

What kept everyone in check; ensuring that no one was shortchanged? One thing that certainly helped…

Gossip.

Imagine a community of 50-100 people, everyone knows each other and you were known as the “person who didn’t share a portion of meat”. It would be difficult to barter in the future – making life more strenuous than it already was.

Shame plays a powerful role in our lives.

This is the reason why anonymity is not always a good thing. An example would be the article written about YouTube Posters identities being revealed.

What does this have to do with crowdsourcing?

I truly believe that crowdsourcing (or a form of it) will be the game changer for a global economy.  As long as the ideas are organized and the process is well thought out. It is important to have transparent systems in place to ensure that the creation of a mob mentality does not grow.  In short, bringing the village mentality back.

I will leave you with this video with Philip Zimbardo on his talk about the Psychology of Evil.
 

Onward,

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein

Innovation is the key to success. Some individuals believe that there are two business strategies: low cost products for the mass market and innovative products with larger margins. Technology and vertical integration are allowing businesses to do both – the only strategy left is a hybrid of innovation and low cost products.

The real competitive advantage will be in finding new processes which harness, organize and refine these creative flows into products and get those products to market as fast as possible.

Creativity is awesome! Yet it is still a right brain activity that deals with your intuition, imagination and non-verbal attributes, making it difficult for a person to really communicate a complex idea.

Now imagine you have processes that capture and harness all of your businesses creative processes. You still have to figure out how you are going to get people to contribute their best ideas to you. What is stopping your best knowledge workers from starting up a business and doing it themselves?

These two areas of business strategy will make the difference in the future. Work life will be a larger component to retaining people for the job (specifically excellent knowledge workers) as well as a solid vision, mission and values.

Some examples of this:

• Atlassian  Development and their “FedEx Days”
• Google and their 70/20/10 rule

Companies are taking note and realizing that this is producing great benefits for them and for their employees. As time progresses, I believe companies will adopt these “creative bursts”.

How does this apply to Crowdsourcing?

The crowd will only do what they want to do. They will work on projects for society, but also for their self-fulfillment – creating systems which encourage the crowd to have “creative bursts” more frequently and collectively – this is how I see crowdsourcing generating value.

I recently received an email from Jimmy Wales of the Wikipedia Foundation asking for a donation. Even though it was a templated email blast, I believed that this Wikipedia email deserved some attention especially considering how often I have utilized Wikipedia's services.

Dear David,

I'm a volunteer.

I don't get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia, and neither do our thousands of other volunteer authors and editors. When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising, but I decided to do something different.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

To keep Wikipedia ad-free, we ask for donations every year on the site. We're sending you this email because we are scaling up our infrastructure this year, and we're simply not able to raise the whole budget from the banners alone.

I agreed thus far.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. It is a unique human project, the first of its kind in history. It is a humanitarian project to bring a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet.

Every single person.

Yes, I was still on the same page as Jimmy.

If all of Wikipedia's 400 million users would donate $1 each, we would have 20 times the amount of money we need. We're a small organization, and I've worked hard over the years to keep us lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.

This is what was interesting. If every person who used Wikipedia donated $1 it would be more than enough.

But I didn't.

I sent the email to the trash bin.

Why?

Simply put; the energy of clicking the link, filling out my contact information and typing in $1, did not offset the feel good emotion I would have received doing so. Putting it bluntly: I did not care enough and was too lazy to click on links and buttons to give Wikipedia a donation.

How does this relate to crowd sourcing:

It has everything to do with the crowd. The dream of having enormous groups of people hashing out a logo design or designing the next electric car is unattainable.  When making a crowdsourced platform one needs to be focused on catering to particular groups (or "Tribe" as Seth Godin put it) who are committed to the vision, mission and values of that particular project. I am sure that the volunteers who edit the pages of Wikipedia delved deeper into their pockets than myself. This teaches us that when utilizing crowd sourcing – primarily focus on the engaged group, then on the individuals who are less engaged. Furthermore, the one great thing about crowd sourced donations is that the less engaged (such as myself in this example) have a greater probability to give something, rather than nothing.

How exciting! We have discovered one more key to the rubrics cube of crowd sourcing.

Onward,

David

P.S. After writing this post – I owe it to Jimmy Wales to make a donation and encourage you to do the same. Click here to make a one-time donation