Crowdsourcing turned inside-out

This is a long post, so let me summarize: crowdsourcing lets companies outsource tasks to the crowd. But there's another new production model that does just the opposite by allowing communities to outsource tasks to corporations (without paying them a dime.) Interested? Read on.

According to Jeff Howe, the author who coined the term, "crowdsourcing" is defined as "when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it to the crowd." Threadless, an online t-shirt store that Howe uses as an example, harnesses a community of artists to design its shirts. The community votes on the designs, and artists whose designs receive the most votes win a cash prize. In this model, the company draws on the ideas of the crowd to create products and services on which they can profit.

Another example of crowdsourcing is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for "Human Intelligence Tasks," where companies pay workers across the globe to complete minor tasks for which computers are ill-suited. (More about Mechanical Turk here.)

It's easy to see why this model would appeal to corporations. Crowdsourcing allows them to gather ideas for products and services, and even to complete mundane tasks, all at little or no cost.

Yet while companies are harnessing the crowd to increase profits, the crowd has also demostrated its ability to coordinate on its own, without a corporation to guide its work. Wikipedia is a classic example of this sort of commons-based peer production, in which people come together to create something useful without the structure of a traditional organization.

Author Clay Shirky has written a book on this subject entitled Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In it he demonstrates how the internet increasingly allows large groups to coordinate effectively without help from organizations. (Shirky discusses the basic premise of his book in short videos here and here.)

While Wikipedia may allow users to collaborate without the guidance of a corporation, some open source projects completely invert the logic of crowdsourcing by opening up the collaborative process such that corporations actually work for the community without being paid.

Linux, the open source operating system, receives contributions of code from many talented programmers, all over the world, driven by a diverse range of motivations. Many of those contributors work for companies that depend on Linux, and thus pay their programmers to contribute to the project.

Just as corporations can outsource tasks to communities of users, so too can open-source communities outsource tasks to corporations. Both models are fairly new. My bet is that both will grow in importance in the coming years. But is one more important, or more promising, than the other? Feel free to discuss in the comments.