Camel or horse: Wisdom of the crowds

"A Camel is a horse designed by a committee" – so goes the old saying. However, Gen Y believes differently; with online communities becoming a powerful way of sourcing information, collaboration and co-creation is becoming the preferred way of working. In 2005, the word "Crowdsourcing" was coined – a portmanteau word originating from "Crowd" and "Outsourcing".
"Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas or content, by soliciting from a large group of people, and especially from an online community."
~Source: Wikipedia
In his book, Crowdsourcing, Brabham classified crowdsourcing into the following types:

• Knowledge Discovery and Management: Where an online community is tasked with the responsibility of collecting and collating information relating to a particular topic. For example, when I put out an online question asking people of a Knowledge community for their definition of knowledge management, I am collating the different responses from group members, identifying key words used in the definition, the frequency of occurrence of specific key words, to come up with a definition that best expresses Knowledge Management.
  Interdisciplinary annotations and trends are yet another example of using the crowdsourcing approach to emergent semantic networks (a network that represents relationships between two concepts – for example, ontology and taxonomy, knowledge and intelligence)
• Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking: This is actually more of micro-task management. A large task is split up into smaller components and distributed across several people. This is then assembled to arrive at the final objective. Analysis of large data sets is usually carried out this way. Large projects which can be deconstructed into micro-projects are also usually crowd-sourced, with people bidding for the smaller projects. Organizations which have formal tie-ups with Universities as part of their University-Industry Linkage, have been known to adopt this approach.
• Broadcast Search: Ideation problems typically fall into this category. This is also what we usually find in online communities and forums. When people have a specific problem, they broadcast their question to the online community, for example, StackOverFlow, and then review the results to decide on the best result. This kind of problem usually has a definite answer – for example, "Why does 'Tour De Flex' show I am not connected to the internet, although I am online".
• Creative Production: The most famous example is possibly Threadless (https://www.threadless.com/make/submit/). This company encourages you to submit designs for t-shirts, and you get paid whenever a t-shirt manufacturing company selects your design for mass production. This is usually done when we need a creative design, not necessarily a single correct answer, and we end up asking the community for ideas. When Lays reached a plateau in sales, they turned to crowdsourcing ideas for new flavors – a competition resulted in several ideas for new flavors coming up from amateur flavor experts – housewives and children – reviving flagging sales by introduction of new flavors.

So, is all social collaboration Crowdsourcing. In a very loose manner of speaking, any collaboration that involves people outside a formally defined team can be called crowdsourcing. However, where the results cannot be quantified or substantiated as having been derived specifically as a result of participation of external resources, it cannot be called Crowdsourcing.
What are the characteristics of a Social Collaboration tool that supports Crowdsourcing?

• Online participation: The most fundamental aspect of course, is that the participation happens beyond the borders of an organization (or a business unit, in the case of very large organizations).
• Context: Crowdsourcing is most effective when there is a definite context in which participation occurs. Examples are:
  • A problem or issue that requires resolution, and internal sources may not have the requisite experience or know-how to address the issue
  • Data or Content Collection and collation: Used for obtaining data from a large group of people, which is collated. For example, research citations and profiling
  • Survey: Polls or surveys conducted to obtain data from a large source of people which is then used for research and analysis
• Platform: Ideation or Innovation platforms – this is usually organized around a domain or topic – where idea generation is the objective. The idea generation can take many forms – suggestion box, prototype presentations, contests – the platform usually supports reward and recognition mechanisms
• Micro-tasking – This is usually a specific configuration of generic crowd-sourcing tools – where the key functionality of project or task management will exist. However, the focus is on being able to generate participation externally, and the task is of a nature where it can be distributed.