Chapter 20
Following the Future of Crowdsourcing: Ten (Or So) Websites to Watch
In This Chapter
Checking out the sites that crowdsourcers follow
Going global
Following the progress of crowdsourcing
Building new platforms
As soon as you become a crowdsourcer, you might start to wonder how crowdsourcing itself is developing and where it’s heading. You might find yourself asking how you can keep track of trends and stay ahead of the field. Who knows – you might even decide to crowdsource your dilemma. You could go to your favourite microtasking site and post a task: ‘Tell me the latest trend in crowdsourcing’ and offer $1.41 (£1) for the answer. When you get the answer, though, you’re likely to be disappointed. You’ve not created a clear statement of work with concrete instructions (see Chapter 11), so you’re likely to get an arbitrary opinion from someone in the crowd. An arbitrary opinion’s an arbitrary opinion, no matter who holds it. It may be right. It may be wrong. You can’t tell.
Rather than you creating a well-crafted crowdsourcing job to tell you about the future (which is entirely possible), instead you’ll get a better picture of the future by following the select group of crowdsourcing sites that I name-check in this chapter. Some of these sites give you information about the crowdsourcing industry; others are trying to create new crowdsourcing services that may – or may not – work. By keeping a close watch on all these sites, you can keep your finger on the pulse and discover where the industry’s going and what the futures holds for it – and for you.
Discovering the State of Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing.org
To know where crowdsourcing's going, you need to know where it is at present. You can get a clear picture of crowdsourcing by going to the crowdsourcing.org website (www.crowdsourcing.org). This industry information website is the closest thing in the crowdsourcing field to a trade association. Crowdsourcing.org is, however, a private company that offers consulting and advice on crowdsourcing issues. Don't be fooled by the address, which suggests that it's a non-profit organisation.
Crowdsourcing.org provides some of the most complete and comprehensive information about the current state of the crowdsourcing industry. Among the information available on this site, you can find:
A crowdsourcing providers list: Crowdsourcing.org provides the most complete listing of crowdsourcing platforms on the Internet. Its list includes companies that use crowdsourcing, those that offer software to help others who are crowdsourcing, and companies that offer services.
This list is organised by topic: crowd labour (microtasking and macrotasking), crowd creativity (crowdcontests), crowdfunding, distributed knowledge (self-organised crowds and microtasking) and tools (software platforms for industry and organisations).
A crowdfunding accreditation programme: About half the website is devoted to crowdfunding. Crowdsourcing.org has created a set of standards for crowdfunding that guarantee a minimum level of transparency and accountability. The programme certifies crowdsourcing sites that follow the standards, so you have a means for checking the trustworthiness of crowdfunding sites.
Expert commentary on crowdsourcing media: Crowdsourcing.org offers videos and articles about crowdsourcing, prepared by experts in the field or by leaders of the crowdsourcing industry. Many of these commentaries describe crowdsourcing problems and applications of crowdsourcing that may be difficult or unusual, and show how they can be handled on a commercial crowdsourcing platform. Some of these commentaries deal with problems in the industry and are of interest to people who work within the industry.
Reports and infographics on the crowdsourcing industry: Crowdsourcing.org is one of the few organisations of any form that gathers information about the crowdsourcing industry. It offers a collection of reports that are complete and thorough. Most of these reports are of interest to people who want to work with the crowdsourcing industry. From these reports you can learn about the different companies that offer crowdsourcing, the amount of business these firms have and the amount of capital they’ve raised.
Reading the Morning News: Daily Crowdsource
For up-to-date information about what's happening in the world of crowdsourcing – indeed, if you want to know what events have happened overnight – turn to Daily Crowdsource (http://dailycrowdsource.com). This website is an industry trade journal based in the USA. It publishes company press releases, stories and research reports on the industry, and provides a forum for industry leaders and observers to discuss the trends that they're observing.
On DailyCrowdsource.com you can keep abreast of the crowdsourcing industry and find out about new crowdsourcing sites and services, get news of upcoming crowdsourcing conferences and meetings (and read reports from those meetings), and keep up with trends in the crowdsourcing industry by following the comments of leaders and experts.
Highlights of the website include:
A regular trade show for users, called Crowdopolis. (The audience for this trade show consists of people who are interested in using crowdsourcing in their business or work. Crowdopolis is a good place to get an overview of the field and learn about the business aspects of crowdsourcing.)
An archive of useful crowdsourcing tips.
A collection of crowdsourcing case studies.
The daily news wall and email notifications.
Whitepapers and statistics on the crowdsourcing industry.
The Daily Crowdsource and crowdsourcing.org (see the preceding section) offer some of the same information. However, each site has its own approach to the industry and each offers material that can’t be found on the other.
Getting the European Perspective: crowdsourcingblog.de
If you're looking at the future of crowdsourcing, you can't limit yourself to just the US perspective. The news from Europe is just as interesting and suggests that crowdsourcing may be tightly connected to entrepreneurship and small newly formed companies (often called start-ups). You can get a good perspective on the European news from crowdsourcingblog.de (www.crowdsourcingblog.de), a site based in Germany.
Crowdsourcingblog.de presents some of the same information that you can find on crowdsourcing.org or Daily Crowdsource. Indeed, you occasionally see these three sites cross-link each other’s stories. However, crowdsourcingblog.de has a directory of European crowdsourcing firms. It also divides the field in its own way, offering lists of sites that specialise in creative activities, crowdfunding, charitable organisations, innovation crowdsourcing and microtasking. Crowdsourcingblog.de is closely connected to the German business start-up community, and participates in start-up conferences in Germany and hosts information and conferences on start-ups. It also holds an annual conference for the European crowdsourcing community.
If you need to move beyond the stories from continental Europe, you can see stories from the UK at Crowdsourcing Gazette UK (www.crowdsource-gazette.com). As with crowdsourcingblog.de, this site publishes a lot of news that you can also get at Daily Crowdsource or crowdsourcing.org. However, it also runs stories about crowdsourcing in the UK that you can't find anywhere else.
Meeting the Leaders: CrowdConf and Crowdopolis
You can get good stories and good information about the future of an industry by meeting the industry leaders. In crowdsourcing, a good way to meet these leaders is by going to crowdsourcing conferences. Some of the best conferences are small impromptu gatherings called business mashups, or sometimes just mashups. Mashups are meetings where information is distributed informally, there are opportunities to meet people who are starting businesses that may be similar to yours, and there are social events where a few people give brief presentations on a subject.
You can find out about mashups by following Facebook pages that support entrepreneurship, by subscribing to business school newsletters and by being part of an active local business community. Since mashups often deal with the problems of starting new innovative businesses, speakers often talk about how to use technology and people to do work more efficiently – subjects that are part of crowdsourcing.
Mashups are often associated with business schools or cities that have a strong tradition of entrepreneurship, so you can find mashups on the subject of crowdsourcing in places such as Silicon Valley or New York or Berlin. If you can’t go to one of these mashups, an alternative is to visit CrowdConf or Crowdopolis – two of the big industry meetings.
CrowdConf (www.crowdconf.com) is currently the big crowdsourcing industry gathering. It meets every autumn in San Francisco and is the one place where all parts of the crowdsourcing industry meet to share their insight and lessons. The conference is affiliated with the microtasking company CrowdFlower (www.crowdflower.com) and tends to draw a lot of companies that are interested in microtasking.
Crowdopolis is targeted more at companies that may want to use crowdsourcing. It's associated with Daily Crowdsource and is held in difference cities around the globe. You can find out more about Crowdopolis meetings at the Daily Crowdsource website (http://dailycrowdsource.com).
Both of these conferences maintain significant websites and post videos of the presentations. If you can’t go the meetings, you can at least go to the websites and learn a little bit about what’s happening to crowdsourcing and how you can use it.
Tracking Equity Crowdfunding: Crowdcube and Indiegogo
One of the big questions about the future of crowdsourcing concerns the future of equity crowdfunding – when will it be made legal in the USA and how will it work around the world? (Chapter 6 tells you more about equity crowdfunding.) You can get some great information from websites such as crowdsourcing.org, but you can also learn a great deal by looking at crowdsourcing platforms such as Crowdcube and Indiegogo that are doing or preparing for equity crowdfunding.
Crowdcube (www.crowdcube.com) is a British site that's already engaged in equity crowdfunding. It's associated with the Innovation Centre at the University of Exeter. The university has used the site to raise funds for the new companies formed by its students and faculty, but other firms that are incorporated in the UK can also use Crowdcube for small-scale equity crowdfunding.
Indiegogo (www.indiegogo.com) is one of the groups in the USA that's been pushing for equity crowdfunding. It supported the change in US law that'll make equity crowdfunding legal, and is preparing to be among the first platforms to offer equity crowdfunding. Indiegogo.com will probably reflect the strategies of the US crowdfunding industry as that industry adopts the equity funding model.
By looking at these two sites, you get a first impression of how equity crowdfunding works. These platforms are likely to provide some of the first ideas about how equity crowdfunding will work and how successful it may be.
Monitoring the Growth of the Global Crowd: Clickworker and Trabajo
Slowly but steadily, crowdsourcing is growing beyond its base in the English-speaking world. Europe is starting to create a crowdsourcing industry, and Latin America has created its first crowdsourcing companies. You can monitor the growth of crowdsourcing in these two regions by monitoring the fortunes of two crowdsourcing platforms: Clickworker and TrabajoFreelance.
Clickworker (www.clickworker.com) is a German microtasking platform that's trying to build a presence in the European market by offering crowdsourcing services in multiple languages. It draws a crowd from 70 countries and offers four standardised services in all the major European languages:
Search-engine-optimised content
Tagging and metadata
Translation
Web research
The fortunes of Clickworker will be a measure of how well the industry can grow beyond its English-language base.
In Latin America, crowdsourcing has a very small presence. At the time of writing, only a few companies offer crowdsourcing services in the region. Brazil has an annual crowdsourcing conference (http://conferenciacrowdsourcing.com.br) but it's dominated by organisations that are interested in collaboration and co-creation, which isn't quite the same thing as crowdsourcing.
Latin America does, however, have at least one macrotasking website – TrabajoFreelance (www.trabajofreelance.com), based in Argentina. You can follow the prospects of crowdsourcing in Latin America by following Trabajo.
Trabajo is really a cross between a traditional macrotasking firm – a company such as Elance or oDesk – and a traditional freelance agency. The company not only offers macrotasking services such as web creation, graphic design and financial services, but also light construction and repair. At the moment, Trabajo is able to do both crowdsourcing and contracting because it primarily serves Buenos Aires, which contains half of Argentina’s whole population.
Some crowdsourcing platforms have already started to build a strong presence in multiple countries. Amazon's microtasking platform, Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), has a crowd in the English-speaking world, and Clickworker is building a strong position in Europe. If Trabajo expands as a crowdsourcing firm and starts offering crowdsourcing services to other countries, it will be a sign that crowdsourcing's arrived in Latin America.
Expanding the Scope of Crowdcontests: Kaggle
Crowdcontests are a successful form of crowdsourcing, but they tend to be applied only to creative problems: designing business cards, designing posters and designing T-shirts, for example. Several industry leaders believe that the potential applications of crowdcontests could be wider in scope, that crowdcontests can be used to provide other services as well. As yet, however, they haven’t provided much evidence to sustain their point.
One crowdcontest platform that doesn't provide design services is Kaggle (www.kaggle.com). Kaggle uses crowdcontests to carry out statistical analyses and predictions. The success of the platform may mean that the world can learn from it about potential uses of crowdcontests for new applications.
Kaggle follows a process that's remarkably similar to the design contests run by the crowdsourcing platform 99designs (http://99Designs.com) and to the video production of Genius Rocket (http://geniusrocket.com). Kaggle's process allows you to post data and a description of the kind of analysis or projection that you want. Members of the crowd then submit their solutions to the problem and you choose the one that best meets your need.
Kaggle does seem to be successful and is marking out a path that others may follow. It’s certainly shown that crowdcontests tend to be successful when contestants feel that they learn something from the process even when they don’t win. At Kaggle, each contest gives the crowd the chance to test its skills on a new data set.
Promoting Innovation: AHHHA and Innovation Exchange
Many companies, especially those that sell consumer products to the mass market, were quick to embrace innovation crowdsourcing (see Chapter 18). Other companies, however, were cautious. They weren’t sure that innovation crowdsourcing was any better than conventional methods for developing new products, and were concerned that innovation crowdsourcing exposed the inner workings of any company to the public. The fortunes of AHHHA and Information Exchange may give clues as to the future of this application of crowdsourcing.
AHHHA (www.ahhha.com) is a small-scale innovation firm and works with entrepreneurs and inventors. It not only provides a crowdmarket to develop products, it also provides other services for bringing products to market. AHHHA has had a few early successes but is still working to bring innovation crowdsourcing to a large market. If it succeeds, AHHHA will have demonstrated that innovation crowdsourcing can move beyond large companies.
Innovation Exchange (www.innovationexchange.com) works at the other extreme of innovation crowdsourcing. It deals with large, grand challenges. It advertises that it works with the largest companies in the world (companies that are often called the Global 5000) and with the top 100 global non-profit organisations. It wants to present problems that are on the scale of the Netflix challenge (see Chapters 18 and 22) or the Darpa Red Balloon Challenge (see Chapter 9). While Innovation Exchange has also had some success, it's still working to be identified as a major innovation platform. Should it get the success it desires, the company will establish innovation crowdsourcing as a good way to deal with big, difficult problems.
By keeping an eye on these two platforms, you’ll be able to track the future of innovation crowdsourcing.
Building New Microtasking Platforms: MobileWorks and Tagasauris
Microtasking, although already a firmly established form of crowdsourcing, may need a new generation of crowdsourcing platforms to appear before it can advance much further. At the moment, microtasking is limited to a certain number of fields: handwriting recognition, sentiment analysis, data cleaning and search optimisation. You can apply microtasking to other problems, but better ways of controlling and combining the results of these tasks may be needed for the application to be effective. The progress of two platforms, MobileWorks and Tagasauris, may suggest the future direction of this form of crowdsourcing.
MobileWorks (www.mobileworks.com) is a general-purpose microtasking platform, like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. However, MobileWorks is trying to expand the microtask market so that it can engage the members of the crowd no matter where they are and what kind of computing device they have. The crowd members can be sitting at their desks, looking at their phones or reading from a tablet computer. Because MobileWorks can be easily used from any kind of device, it may prove to be a simple way of creating self-organised crowds for gathering data and pictures.
Tagasauris (www.tagasauris.com) is a platform that's been very active in developing the concepts of workflow. As a business, it offers the services of photographic tagging. You can give the platform a set of images and it asks the crowd to create descriptions of these images. Originally, Tagasauris used microtasking to do the work, but as it developed its tagging services, it developed a sophisticated method of handling workflow and began incorporating some macrotasking as well. As a result, Tagasauris now uses multiple crowdmarkets and has many ways of combining the work from the crowd.
Both MobileWorks and Tagasauris are working to have a larger presence in the marketplace and to support more and more applications. The success of these companies, or at least the success of the technology they support, should suggest the future of microtasking.
Macrotasking in the Boardroom: 10EQS
Traditionally, crowdsourcing has been a form of labour and not of management. It certainly can tag and translate and transcribe and design, but can it also guide a company? Can it be a presence in the corporate boardroom? Can it create a strategic plan or produce tactical memos? The Swiss firm 10EQS (www.10eqs.com) is working to develop crowdsourcing as a business strategy service.
10EQS provides companies with short-term access to business or subject experts, and has access to a crowd with substantial training and business expertise. These experts can help with a variety of business needs:
Data collection and benchmarking
Economic and business projections
Market and competitive analysis
Strategic planning and forecasting
10EQS faces a tough task. Crowdsourcing usually doesn’t do a good job of dealing with company history, conflicting views or investors’ long-term goals. If, however, 10EQS proves to be a success as a business strategy firm, it will show that crowdsourcing can indeed work at all levels of a corporation.