Crowdsourcing from the Crowd

John Winsor, Business Week contributor as solicited opinions from the twitterazzi about the phenomenom of crowd sourcing.

Some have predicted that the crowdsourcing phenomenon will accelerate creativity across a larger network. Others, meanwhile, have predicted the practice of opening up a task to the public instead of keeping it in-house or using a contractor will prove to be the demise of many industries. To accompany my piece on the future of the discipline, we decided to open things up. By canvassing opinions through Twitter and through my personal blog, I’m able to give you the crowd’s take on crowdsourcing.

Commentors include Shaun Abrahamson (@shaunabe), Brett T. T. Macfarlane (@macfarbt), Doron Reuveni (@doronr), Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3), Zeny Huang (@zenydala).

The trick with crowd sourcing is finding out the types of tasks that are appropriate for the crowd. Once you do that, the next challenge is figuring out a way to leverage the crowd in a cost effective way. Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to filter images for porn is a great way to effectively use the crowd to solve a problem that could not be solved as cost effectively in-house.