Now that I’m at Samasource, I get to indulge my fascination with the ideas around “crowdsourcing” a lot more. It’s a new enough concept that even that term is falling out of favor. The whole idea tickles me because it allows for a whole new speculative realm of problem-solving.

First, here’s Clay Shirky from a year ago, breathlessly describing the Big Deal that crowdsourced collaboration models represent in the historical context of human production:

And below is a more recent, deeper look into these ideas, by Jonathan Zittrain. As it turns out, there are many issues to mull over with crowdsourcing: How do labor laws apply? What are the social effects of disaggregating and anonymizing your work to the point where you have no idea what ends your efforts serve? Zittrain does a back-of-the-envelope calculation: A brute-force Amazon Mechanical Turk search could identify any single Iranian protester out of 76 million photographs for a mere $17k. What are the implications of this? The first half of the talk is interesting and entertaining (and Samasource gets a mention, about 15 minutes in) but there is really good discussion with the audience in the second half: the place is packed with big thinkers:

UPDATE: Zittrain lists as one of the potential negative effects of crowdsourcing the ability for political operatives to simulate large-scale citizen actions online. This is also known as “astroturfing” (a play on the term “grass roots”), but crowdsourcing has the potential to reduce the cost of it dramatically. As it turns out, this potential negative effect has been realized: Here’s an article describing how rewards (offer) systems in online games are allowing the health insurance industry to get gamers to fill out surveys and send letters to their representatives. Done well, this would be very difficult to distinguish from genuine political expression. Thanks to Health Policy Dialog for the link.

Related Posts:

• Pan Economicus (October, 2005)
• WattzOn: Personal Energy Profile (December, 2008)
• TED Talks: War Tapes, The Direction of History, Ant Colonies, and a Passionate Life (April, 2008)
• consumer products (May, 2006)
• Plug it in, Plug it in (July, 2007)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under samasource, society, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.