Neighborhood Watching

Jeff Howe of Wired magazine examines whether crowdsourcing is evil. I’m just trying to understand what crowdsourcing is and how it is being used.

Crowdsourcing involves submitting work traditionally completed by an employee or contractor but instead is offered to a group of people or community. Utilizing Web 2.0 differently, business, organizations, authors, and journalists have been making crowdsourcing trendy.

Sure, it makes complete sense that the business can turn to this form of product creation especially in a social networking world where everyone is an expert. People are competing in this weak economy to find innovative ways to cut expenses in their cost structure and this is one way to do it. I’m a huge fan of twitter and I can see an underlying sense of crowdsourcing there where celebrities ask fans for opinions about their next venture or product.

I have a friend who runs an editing company (www.papercheck.com) and his editors are all over the nation. He doesn’t need anyone in his office. The editors just have to pass a grammar test and then they can choose which hours they work. They are connected through the Facebook and Twitter communities and have positive results. When I think of crowdsourcing, I think if my friends’s paper editing company.

Crowdsourcing is in its infancy and this use of web 2.0 should be given more time to develop before judging it as evil. The only real issue I have with crowdsourcing is it name. Can we call it something else? I'm always tempted to call is crowdscoring when I read crowdsourcing. Let’s call it something else.... perhaps neighborhood watching.