Crowdsourcing by Daren C. Brabham

Author:Daren C. Brabham [Brabham, Daren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262314251
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The Future of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has steadily proliferated across many disciplines and into new contexts as new industries embrace the model to rejigger old and inefficient operations and to invent entirely new uses. Where crowdsourcing goes, researchers follow. In this chapter, I outline future growth areas for crowdsourcing, both in new applications and new research directions across disciplines.

Future Technology

As ubiquitous computing becomes the norm in our lives, flexible crowdsourcing platforms will become easy for everyday people to use and will be seamlessly integrated into our normal life processes. The success of platforms like InnoCentive and Mechanical Turk demonstrates the usefulness of easy-to-use platforms that individuals and organizations can access for specific problem-solving purposes on an as-needed basis. Wide-reaching, flexible platforms will come to predominate over in-house and ad-hoc crowdsourcing applications. This presents opportunities for organizations that do not need or cannot afford to set up their own large-scale crowdsourcing applications. Crowdsourcing platforms will come to be seen by organizations as run-of-the-mill third-party vendors, not much different from copying and printing vendors, shipping and logistics vendors, or management consultants.

In this sense, the question of technology for organizations will be moot. Crowdsourcing will move from a technological approach to a business service. IT advisory services, such as Gartner and Forrester, or management consulting firms, such as McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group, will eventually rate crowdsourcing platforms and advise on their strategic use, and key officers in an organization will make the decisions about which crowdsourcing platforms to engage. The technology that drives crowdsourcing is relatively simple. Most crowdsourcing applications are similar to basic mobile applications or Web sites that run on content-management systems. Crowdsourcing is a process for connecting organizations to online communities and exchanging information between them. Free, open-source code for crowdsourcing applications is available now, and eventually the technological skeleton of crowdsourcing will be as widely taken for granted by organizations and users as the technological skeleton of email.

There will also be a general trend toward the increasing use of crowdsourcing platforms that use mobile technology. Mobile phones are bridging the digital divide in developing nations around the world as more people access the Internet via mobile devices than via laptops or desktop computers. Crowdsourcing applications will adapt to allow SMS-based contributions as well as rich mobile Web contributions from smart phones. Flexible crowdsourcing platforms that automatically reconfigure for mobile browsing will be optimal. Ushahidi and other crowdsourcing services that have taken hold in developing countries demonstrate the potential for growth in crowdsourcing around the world, enabled by widespread mobile phone use.

Future Applications

As an application of deliberative democratic theory, traditional public-participation programs in urban planning and governance seek to cultivate citizen input and produce public decisions that are agreeable to all stakeholders. In one public-participation context, involving citizens in the urban-planning process helps ensure that a plan will be more widely accepted by its future users. Public-participation programs in urban planning also value nonexpert or nonmainstream knowledge brought into the creative problem-solving process of planning.

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