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.

Crowdsourcing is Like Group Sex – Somebody does All the Work and Everybody Gets the Credit

Amy Gahran’s blog pointed me to this wonderful article in Forbes about Crowdsourcing and to be honest there is not much to add to it but only to agree with Dan Woods: Crowds don't innovate--individuals do.
And as I am a firm believer of grassroot initiative and strong supporter of civic movements it makes me sad to see how very often the same crowdsourcing tools are used to render useless the good initiatives by the people as described by Pete Peterson in Techpresident.
The illusion of crowdsourcing in my opinion serves two main coals: it renders a personalized outcome of somebody’s work or thought impersonal leaving also the praise or critics for it impersonal and second it leaves the ownership of the outcome open to be claimed by the crowdsourcing master or a group with enough (legal, PR) power to claim it.

However companies love it or as Businessweek put it: Crowdsourcing - Milk the masses for inspiration