Examiner.com: Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that is gaining fast
acceptance in the business community and beyond. It has the potential to
affect business quite fundamentally and can usher in radical changes to
business models and business processes everywhere.
Crowdsourcing is a method that involves and uses "crowds” (i.e., large,
undefined, randomly distributed, undirected, unsupervised groups of
people) to performs tasks and accomplish goals.
Here are 2 live examples of successful crowdsourcing:
MOBILE PHONE DESIGN
As recently as April – June 2009, LG crowdsourced the design of their
next mobile phone. In a job posted to crowdSPRING in April 2009, LG has
issued a challenge to people everywhere: Design the future of mobile
communication device. Here is what the listing actually said:
"Predict what’s next. What do you think mobile phones should look like
in 2, 5, or 10 years? We are asking for your help. We’re NOT looking for
a long list of specs or phone ideas that already exist. We’re looking
for a cool new concept or "big idea” supported by usage scenario
illustrations.”
AUDITING EXPENSES FILED BY YOUR MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
The U.K. newspaper – Guardian – recently launched a crowdsourcing application called "Investigate your MP’s expenses”.
The landing page says it all: "Join us in digging through the 700,000
documents of MPs’ expenses to identify individual claims, or documents
that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your
own MP’s expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing.
(Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time.
Check back if you haven’t found your MP yet).”
Each MP’s expenses and claims are presented as a set of images, and
users can determine what entries there are on a page, and decide whether
the page is unimportant, interesting, "interesting but known” or worthy
of investigation.
As of June 18th, the site had 77252 pages of documents, of which 23891 are unreviewed. Click here to launch it.
To read on more about other examples of crowdsourcing, please read on here. |
