Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One

Pajamanation has been described amongst other things as a platform for enabling a type of ‘crowdsourcing’ in the jobs market. So what does crowdsourcing mean?

Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One

Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. The official definition from the term’s originator, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”

Certainly the idea of splitting up one large job into smaller discrete components is present in the microjobs concept, but crowdsourcing seems to be more about getting lots of people to do the same thing, or similar parts of the same thing, and then averaging or otherwise analysing the outputs to create one new insight or product. Using a thousand eyeballs to search satellite photographs for a piece of floating ocean wreckage, each being allocated an adjacent few hundred square metres is a niche requirement that may be well suited to Amazon’s mechanical turk service, but microjobs are more suited to the long tail of requirements, where millions of niche tasks can be created, each one unique with its own short specification, terms and delivery style. There is some overlap in the concepts, but it would be worth explaining the differences at an early stage before the words are fully released into the wild to evolve and degenerate through popular usage into looser, woolier phrases with indistinct or inaccurate meanings.