What Crowdsourcing Is

Insourcing and Outsourcing…

Sourcing is a general term for the strategy by which a company (a Requestor) selects a designated agent (a Provider) to complete a task. There are mainly two traditional sourcing strategies: insourcing and outcourcing. Outsourcing is actually qualitatively and quantitatively very similar to insourcing, which involves maintaining paid employees to complete requests. The only real difference between insourcing and outsourcing is that with insourcing, the Provider is on the Requestor’s staff the entire time; with outsourcing the Provider is an external agent (a consultant) chosen through a series of references, referrrals, interviews, and the like.

…versus Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is an offshoot of outsourcing. The breakthrough to crowdsourcing occurs when the external Provider (consultant) ceases being an individual designated agent and instead takes the form of either a larger group or a community of Providers (a crowd). Utilizing crowds to complete tasks allows Requestors to collectively draw upon the diverse levels of knowledge and experience that individual crowd members each posess, and also to mitigate the different ways in which those members might be inaccurate as well. So in addition to providing a broader and more diverse base of knowledge and experience, assembling the right crowd can greatly reduce the effects of errors that stem from the personal biases of isolated individuals and their limited knowledge and experience relative to a much larger group.

Sound exotic? It may at the moment, but get used to it. Everywhere you look companies are turning to a wide variety of crowdsourcing models to do everything from programming, to market surveys, to product development, to R&D.

And AWCWEST uses crowdsourcing to prepare architectural specifications. We’re doing so in part because of the burgeoning number of people sharing their thoughts, talents, ideas, and critiques on all sorts of social media and Web 2.0 applications. Not only has this rise in technology enabled a lot crowdsourcing, but it’s also created a mental shift that’s attuned people to the potentials of crowdsourcing.

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