Second Chance for Crowdsourcing

As I received some well deserved critics from my course mates for not being constructive about the crowdsourcing in my earlier post I decided to read some more on the subject to become more adapt to the concept and that led me to a wonderful book Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Prof. Alex Pentland.

The book turned out to be a very interesting reading material and though I got to it by searching for crowdsourcing materials it covered a lot more. The aim of Pentland's study is to reveal and distinguish the biological honest signals in human communication and to study the effects of subconscious signals to the outcome and the effectiveness of the communication, resulting in so called “reality mining”, giving off the true intent of the communication parties and the means used to achieve them.

The book also has some very good explanations why the crowdsourcing does not appear to be so effective, calling the prime obstacles that crowdsourcing or any other collaborative tool meets the idiots and the gossip.
The idiots in Prof. Pentland’s book represents the phenomena that not the best but most prominent idea gets the most of support and the gossip means that this idea gets repeated again and again by subtle groups that try to sound smart by mimicking the already approved idea. In turn the book also claims that individual are not necessarily better as humans do not make rational, logical decisions and tend to be social in thinking anyway so my opinion is that if one wants to call follow a leader a crowdsourcing then it’s ok, as long as we acknowledge and harvest it accordingly.