This is part three of Crowdsourcing Evolves: An update from the trenches of the new social economy. Read the rest of the series here:
- Crowdsourcing Evolves: An update from the trenches of the new social economy
- Crowdsourcing Evolves: Three Case Studies
In my previous posts, we examined crowdsourcing as an alternative to programming and how crowdsourcing is turning the web into an ad hoc service bureau for web development and potentially any other industry.
In today’s post, we’ll look past the technology to the human dimension of crowdsourcing: the crowd itself.
Care and feeding of a crowd, as I sometimes jokingly refer to it, really is not a joke. It’s one of the key challenges of crowdsourcing. Without an even playing field that benefits both crowds and crowdsourcers, a viable social and economic ecosystem can’t be built, much less sustained. And that doesn’t bode well for crowdsourcing.
So let’s examine some of the challenges and solutions in maintaining a happy, productive crowd:
Challenge #1: Spec Work
Wherever crowdsourcing is happening, you can be certain the specter of spec work is lurking somewhere nearby. In this payment arrangement (or non-arrangement, per se), the crowd produces work without knowing for certain if payment will ever occur. It’s all done “on spec”, meaning that payment happens only if the crowdsourcer likes the work that was submitted and picks what to pay for. The rest of the crowd is out of luck, not to mention the time and energy they’ve spent working on their submissions.
Spec work has been a particular thorn in the side of graphic designers, whose work was one of the first industries to be manifested online using crowdsourcing. Graphic artists have fought back: see no-spec.com to see where the battle lies have been drawn.
Has crowdsourcing evolved beyond spec work for these designers? Not yet. But it has raised a yellow flag for how other crowdsourcing ventures in other industries must address this straight on.
Solution #1: Make pay a near certainty
Increasingly, crowdsourcing sites are focusing on payment schemes that move away from spec work towards alternatives that make payment if not a complete certainty, then at least a safe bet.
Take uTest, which was featured in my previous post. It’s a crowdsourcing site for software testing where the crowd gets paid for each bug they find. Provided the bug has not been identified previously, the crowdsourcer pays for the bug. So unlike spec work, there is no question of the crowdsourcer choosing one bug over all the others submitted, and only paying for that one.
Of course, the entire mechanism of uTest lends itself to this new, fair payment system. The key thing is that the site has found a good balance between the interests of the crowd and crowdsourcer. It’s baked into the way the site works, and a win-win for everyone.
Challenge #2: Crowd Latency (or Boredom)
This is the area where my term tongue-in-cheek term “care and feeding” originally came about. I noticed early on my own brainstorming site BountyStorms, that not all brainstorms are crowded equally.
The site pays a bounty (offered by the crowdsourcer) for great ideas and for voting. But brainstorms with the same bounty amount, say $10, don’t always get the same number of ideas and votes, some much more than others and some less. Why?
The answer seems to lie in the type of question that’s asked, and to what degree it resonates with the crowd. Questions that are challenging and require real creativity, like “Help me name my new puppy training/walking business”, and what I call Oprah questions like “How do I break up with my girlfriend?”, do better than other, more mundane questions like “What is your favorite color?”
Normally, this might become a problem for the site, because you want the crowd to produce great answers either way. But fortunately over time, a group of enthusiastic regulars who just enjoy using the site has formed, ensuring a baseline of quality answers for any question that’s posted.
Solution #2: Make it engaging, fun and gratifying
The bottom line is that enthusiasm makes a big difference both in the short and long haul. Who says crowdsourcing has to be all about work any way? Why not make it fun instead?
This happens on BountyStorms in two ways: the site offers an outlet where creative people can flex their creative muscles, and what’s more, it pays them for having a good time, albeit in micro-payments. I no longer underestimate how much a quick and gratifying brainstorming session, combined with an honorarium for their thoughts, matter to the site’s community of brainstormers.
Other emerging crowdsourcing sites would do well to explore this important dimension of usability. Or in other words, just make it fun.
[Edward Cruz is founder and creator of BountyStorms.com, a new brainstorming site that uses crowdsourcing to generate great ideas, and that rewards the best answers with real bounty. Stay tuned here as this week he concludes his series with case studies and conclusions and a look into the evolution of crowdsourcing. - mrh]
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