"Crowdsourcing has emerged as a compelling alternative to the traditional processes that firms rely on to innovate and to create and capture value."

Opening Statement

For several years now, I've been writing articles and reports for the Cutter Consortium about crowdsourcing in general, about the emergence of innovation intermediaries to support crowdsourcing, and about the various phenomena that demonstrate the power of crowds, such as open source software and user-generated content. I am therefore delighted to serve as Guest Editor for this month's Cutter IT Journal, in which we seek to better understand how organizations can effectively interact with this curious beast called "the crowd."

Simply put, crowdsourcing¹ is the practice of leveraging large groups of (often anonymous) people to complete tasks, generate ideas, make decisions, and solve problems. Crowds are increasingly being used for a variety of purposes -- as distributed microworkers, as co-creation partners for product and service development, in aggregated form as mechanisms for capturing "collective intelligence" about markets and other knowledge domains, and as separate individuals each potentially capable of bringing that "Eureka!" moment to bear on some thorny problem facing an organization. Crowdsourcing has emerged as a compelling alternative to the traditional processes that firms rely on to innovate and to create and capture value. This is particularly true in the IT industry (hardware/software production and IT service provision) and indeed in a variety of IT-intensive sectors (finance, media, health, etc.) as well.

Just as IT can benefit from crowds, crowds can benefit from IT. Collaboration is, of course, an ancient art, and distributed human effort raised barns, filled libraries, and maintained common land for millennia before electricity, let alone computers, came on the scene. Nonetheless, most of the contemporary demonstrations of the power of crowds are enabled by (indeed rely upon) IT platforms. For example, the effectiveness of Amazon.com's product recommendation engine is dependent on the activities and preferences of millions of shoppers, but it is just as dependent on the data capture and data processing mechanisms that bring the distributed intelligence of the crowd together. Likewise, Wikipedia would not exist without its army of volunteers, but those volunteers rely upon the collaborative editing functionality of the Wikimedia platform. There are many examples of this relationship between the crowd and technology, such as the use of Internet-based communication and coordination tools in open source software and the tagging functionality that makes sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Delicious so searchable.

These and other examples are exciting, and the crowd would appear to have great potential to revolutionize the ways organizations innovate, produce, and engage with markets. However, as is the case with all promising phenomena, there are multiple challenges that need to be overcome. I'll provide just four examples here:

1. Crowds are noisy and chaotic, and coordinating their efforts (or helping them to coordinate their own efforts) is not a trivial undertaking.

2. While crowds are potentially very smart, we need mechanisms for aggregating their widely distributed intelligence if we are to make use of it.

3. Crowds make mistakes and produce work of mixed quality, thus we need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff (or again, to help the crowd do so itself).

4. Crowds are made of people, and people each have their own individual drives and goals. Thus, motivating the crowd is a critical issue -- particularly when the outcome is for the benefit of a firm, not a public good.

Inspired by both the opportunities and challenges created by the crowdsourcing phenomenon, for this issue we called for articles exploring the mutually dependent and varied relationships between IT and crowds. In particular, we asked our authors to consider questions such as:

• How can crowds be leveraged effectively to solve technological innovation problems, to develop new products/services (or enhance existing ones), to improve the software engineering lifecycle, to add value to a firm's technology platform (e.g., Facebook apps), to facilitate the deployment of technologies (e.g., distributed/volunteer computing), and so on?

• What challenges do IT professionals face in working with crowds (technological, operational, legal, or otherwise), and how can such challenges be overcome?

• How can technology help coordinate the efforts of crowds, enable information and knowledge sharing within crowds, aggregate the distributed intelligence of crowds, be used to filter and refine the output of crowds, help crowdsourcers attract (and keep) a crowd, and so on?

• What challenges are associated with these IT solutions, and again, how can such challenges be overcome?

We got a very strong response to our call, with contributions from a wide variety of academic and professional domains. In the end, we settled on five articles, each with its own contribution to make. Our first three articles offer a variety of complementary insights into the ways in which crowds work, the kinds of things that crowds are particularly good at producing, and the tools and techniques that firms can employ to more effectively engage with them.

In our first article, Carl Adams sets the stage by providing a general discussion of the crowdsourcing concept and identifying some of the direct and mediated crowdsourcing models that have emerged in recent years. He then discusses some of the many challenges associated with crowdsourcing -- organizational and technological -- and provides the key insight that successful crowdsourcing depends on understanding the motivations of all actors involved. After summarizing common motivations from representative stakeholders, he examines the question "What are crowds good at?" and identifies specific types of problems and tasks that are particularly crowd-friendly. Finally, he offers practical advice to firms seeking to meet the various challenges created by the crowdsourcing phenomenon.

Our second author, Kevin Brennan, looks at crowdsourcing more narrowly, focusing on leveraging crowds for the specific purpose of generating knowledge repositories. Like Adams, he builds on the important insight that crowds are not a solution to every kind of knowledge problem, and he goes on to identify a range of knowledge goods that can (potentially) be crowdsourced effectively. He then provides concrete advice on both preparing to work with crowds and on creating, managing, and engaging with communities.

Next, Suresh Malladi offers some very solid suggestions about both the technological and organizational characteristics needed to facilitate effective crowdsourcing. From a technological point of view, he highlights the need for publicly available collaboration mechanisms, tools for capturing information and extracting meaning from information once captured, and tools for filtering the work of the crowd. He also highlights the importance of giving the crowd a concrete IT artifact to rally around, drawing inspiration from open source software communities -- one of the most dramatic examples of crowd power. More important, he goes on to discuss the fundamental changes that are needed at an organizational level. These changes are critical if firms are to effectively communicate their goals and problems to crowds and to build lasting, productive relationships with them. Finally, he discusses some possible approaches to engaging with both internal and external crowds.

Our final two articles move away from the general discussion and offer us insights into crowdsourcing within specific contexts.

In our fourth article, Najib Abusalbi, Michael Carney, Sam McLellan, Andrew Muddimer, and Andrew Richardson (a small crowd in and of themselves) explore what I consider to be one of the most intriguing applications of the crowdsourcing phenomenon; that is, the leveraging of "internal" crowds of employees and other organizational stakeholders. Looking at the use of what they call "improvs" (short-duration colocated crowd collaboration events) within one engineering center of an oilfield services company, they offer some interesting examples of how internal crowds can be engaged to stimulate process, product, and service innovation. Their first example involves what to me looks like a cross between crowdsourcing, a traditional focus group, and a military-style postoperation debriefing, and it illustrates how crowds can be used to elicit, capture, and share knowledge within and between engineering teams, thus enabling such teams to learn from both past mistakes and successes. Their second example is a two-phase technique for generating and refining new product/project innovations and is reminiscent of the way crowds are used in the aptly named Quirky website, where members of the crowd submit ideas, which are then voted on (and improved through contributions) by the crowd. Their final example describes an interesting lo-fi (based on sticky notes) collaboration technique for enabling internal crowds to improve on the company's intranet. All three examples are compelling to me because they involve clever manipulation of the (physical) social environment in order to facilitate knowledge sharing within crowds, rather than overreliance on technology as an enabler.

Finally, Maria Lee and Juan Marín Otero offer us insights into crowdsourcing beyond the firm, looking at the use of crowds by government agencies. Drawing on representative initiatives from the US government, they explore the effective use of Internet technologies -- particularly those associated with the Web 2.0 phenomenon such as social media applications and Web services -- to accelerate and enhance the exchange of data between government bodies and citizens. Their analysis primarily focuses on technology design and use, highlighting the importance of high-quality information architectures, of providing a wide range of usable tools, and of leveraging distributed computing resources through Web services and public clouds. However, the cases they discuss also highlight some softer, human issues that are fundamental to crowdsourcing not only in the government context, but really in any context. For example, they highlight the importance of transparency and knowledge dissemination. Crowdsourcing is simply not sustainable when it is a one-way street, and the initiatives Lee and Otero discuss seem to recognize that technology is not just a tool for rapid data collection, but also a tool for increasing transparency and "giving back" to the end users. Similarly, the cases draw attention to one of the greatest hidden powers of crowds, namely, that crowds are powerful information processing engines that can both generate huge amounts of data (or ideas, or creative works) and quickly filter, organize, and improve the resulting information repositories.

WELCOME TO THE CROWD

As a whole, the five articles in this issue provide a stimulating look at the crowdsourcing phenomenon. Reading them, you'll see fairly widespread agreement about the nature and extent of the challenges facing would-be crowdsourcers. More important, each article draws on different sources from both academic research and industry practice to suggest a variety of techniques and tools -- some technological but many organizational and social -- that can be used to address these challenges.

ENDNOTE

¹ Howe, Jeff. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Crown Business, 2008.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Feller is a Senior Lecturer in business information systems at the University College Cork (UCC -- Ireland), where he coordinates the PhD in business information systems program and teaches courses on research methods, electronic business strategy, and software development. Prior to joining UCC, Dr. Feller taught at the Ringling College of Art and Design (USA). His research focuses on collaborative value creation strategies (e.g., open source software, open content, open innovation, and crowdsourcing), and he is Principal Investigator for Open Code, Content, and Commerce (O3C) Business Models, a three-year research project funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Dr. Feller has published four books, including Open Source Development, Adoption, and Innovation. His research has been published in several international journals and conference proceedings, and he has written many articles and reports for practitioner and management audiences. Dr. Feller was Program Cochair for the Third International Conference on Open Source Systems and the founder and Chair of the IEEE/ACM Workshop Series on Open Source Software Engineering (2001-2005). He has served as Guest Editor for open source-themed special issues of several international journals and is Associate Editor for the International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes and International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing. He can be reached at joe@josephfeller.com.