My understanding of Crowdsourcing is to go public with a problem or task and let a large number of users solve it together. TOGETHER! This is the word that since crowdsourcing became so popular has been ignored by most of the companies that “think” they are crowdsourcing.

In this article a company posted a job on oDesk and got a much cheaper rate from some freelancer in Uruguay than they would have got from their local agency. Hello? Any one at home? That’s not crowdsourcing, that’s hiring a freelancer from Uruguay who, surprise, doesn’t charge as much as your local development hot-shop.

You will find many examples where companies think they save cash, but end up spending more on filtering, managing and finalizing the work they have “crowdsourced”.

99Designs.com is a similar case. You can post your brief on the website together with a money price and users can contribute their concepts. You select the winner. So, posting your design job on a website will get you a lot of design submissions, but fact is that the logo you get out of the “contest” for $ 120 is worth, well, $ 120. You have no control of where the design is coming from and it could be the logo of some company in Uruguay. Further you have to be the expert judge and the rational behind the design is minimalistic if nonexistent in most cases.

This from my point of view is not what crowdsourcing should be all about. It is posting a job on a website and let loads of people do independent work for little “dosh” and you are left alone to sort and filter. And the main reason for me to not support this kind of crowdsourcing is the fact that from all the submissions only one get’s paid. Not the entire crowd. Not even a stake for the contribution.

OK, so what should be crowdsourced? There are many examples on Wikipedia, which most of them are projects which solved a problem by a mass of people contributing to find a solution. (I personally would remove 99designs.com, but leave the decision to the crowd)

If you are a designer you should also have a look at http://www.no-spec.com and their take on the subject.

Crowdsourcing is good for research or solving a problem that would either be not solvable by a small team, leads to faster results or takes the advantage of accumulating knowledge.

In any case crowdsourcing should be contributions from the crowd, which result in better products or information that then in turn benefit the crowd.

At least that sounds more ethical and in the end it might just be like open source = free research for the software giants (I shall talk about that later ;) .