A social networking theorist takes aim at crowdsourcing
Manikant (Mani) Narayanan interviews Clay Shirky via telephone May 30, 2007.
Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program. He is also a writer, consultant and speaker. His work has appeared in Business 2.0, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.
Shirky rides against the waves. He has spoken about the wrong side of "tagging," the "semantic Web," and other heavy-duty concepts.
Manikant (Mani) Narayanan: How do you define crowdsourcing?
Clay Shirky: It's one of those words where the definition is a little complicated. If I were to offer a formal definition, I would say it's an analogy with outsourcing, in which work previously done by company employees is offered to and performed by a group of people on the Internet.
Q: You have watched lots of sites transition in terms of participation — including eBay and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. How do you think the participation has changed?
A: The big change in crowdsourcing has been the introduction of money. In "Cathedral and Bazaar," (Eric S.) Raymond makes the point that Linus Torvalds was the first person working on free software who realized that he could recruit developers from all over the world using the Internet. So, since at least 1991, we had this model of distributed, nonmanagerial production, where groups of people come together and don't have the same boss and their salary is not their motivation for creating. That model is going on 20 years — in part because of financial lacking and in part because people were most adept at finding tasks they were interested in rather than what they were paid for.
What's new with crowdsourcing is the introduction of financial motivation on the part of people doing the work. The big question for crowdsourcing is whether this is a series of special cases or is this a general business infrastructure?
