Crowdsourcing: an Evolving Phenomenon

The term "crowdsourcing" might be new to our lexicon, but the concept, as some of our subjects from Interview Week note, has a past as much as it has potential. . .

In politics, Utah representative Steve Urquhart recalls how another Utah representative "crowdsourced" before the Internet: "One of the best examples I can think of is when a member of the Utah Legislature from a rural area, Tom Hatch, would call down to Foy's Diner. They'd put him on speaker, and he would let them know what the Legislature was considering and ask for their feedback. So the folks that were sitting at the coffee counter, they would interact with him and tell him what they thought and how they thought it might affect their area. That was early crowdsourcing."

Among fundraisers, Kiva.org co-founder and CEOMatt Flannery was influenced by "sponsorship" programs : "I grew up sponsoring children and connecting to children all over the world with $20 a month. I had a good experience with that as a kid. Growing up, I visited a lot of people across the world and was deeply affected -- witnessed people having to make choices of buying medicine for one child and feeding the rest of their children, choices no one should have to make. This intimate exposure gave me a reason to care and think about that. But, when I would come back to my comfortable world, there was no way to act on that. I wanted to create a more lasting connection between me and my family and my friends and the people I met in East Africa. I wanted there to be a dignified way to partner with people in the developing world to help them get out of poverty. I was attracted to the idea of lending to people. There’s a mutual respect. You can connect of over ideas for business over making improvements. Progress over poverty is an idea we like to emphasize. I personally was exhausted and desensitized by the emphasis in America and on images of people in poverty and suffering and people dying and babies starving. I think people are overwhelmed and exhausted by that. I was hoping that we could create something a more positive. I was hoping we could focus on doing something that we can succeed in and track, like a business plan."

Thinking of the potential of crowdsoucing, Lionel David founder of Crowdspirit, believes having new means to communicate will spur on more co-develpment and collaboration towards the invention of new consumer electronics: "I think crowdsourcing or more co-development in our case is definitively not a "transitory" phenomenon. The basis of this trend was identified many decades ago by researchers like Eric Von Hippel. The word crowdsourcing could be "transitory," but the trend itself is on its way. [Wired Contributing Editor] Jeff Howe was clearly visionary by inventing this word and by raising it to the public at the perfect time to market. What is more important is the fact that, thanks to the internet, we finally have the means to communicate to the masses, in order to really engage that new industrial revolution which was predicted a long time ago. It's now just a question of time before we see the deep impact that it will have in our society. Moreover, we can look at the macro-economical aspect of this revolution. In the last century, several nations tried various economic systems like capitalism and communism. In this century, crowdsourcing could be seen as a new way of thinking for our future society."

For a business to successfully tap into the crowd, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, chief creative officer for Threadless suggests keeping ego out of it and shifting from money-making to community-building :Any business that doesn’t already exist that has people running it that aren’t egomaniacs. That’s it. You hear community as a buzzword, but some people can’t handle it. If you have 50 million dollars available to advertise a business and tell the world how great your product is, the last thing you want to do is have an open forum where customers can tell each other that its not. It’s bad business. It’s a totally different foundation for running a business. Businesses are about making money—but we tend to look at threadless as a project. We rarely talk about threadless as a business. We tend to talk about it as a project. At the heart of it, its not about making money, its about the community. It’s a simple concept—when people tell you what they want, you give it to them. It’s totally open—you can’t have secrets, executives, and a bunch of bureaucratic levels in a top down business hierarchy. It has to be completely transparent, and anyone can do it. Anyone. As long as you can be a good leader while keeping your ego out of it, you can do it.

--tish grier