Crowdsourcing is the practice of attaining services from large group of people usually via online platforms (Brabham 2013). Crowdsourcing is an efficient method that has many advantages like cost savings, speed, and the ability to work with various skilled participants in which organisations or companies are not able to meet otherwise – it also seeks crowdfunding which supports individuals or groups in need (Hargrave, 2021).
Pros & Cons of crowdsourcing
Pros:
Self-operating tasks (Wazny, 2017).
Scale of research is increased (Wazny, 2017)
Lower in cost (Wazny, 2017).
Exceeds borders and boundaries (Wazny, 2017).
- Increase the speed of speed of research (Wazny, 2017).
Cons:
- Possible malicious users (Wazny,2017).
- Data security and protection (Wazny, 2017)
- Inadequacy of ownership in ideas (Hargrave, 2021)
- Possibility of missing out on the best concepts and ideas (Hargrave, 2021)
In practice crowdsourcing in most cases leads to tremendous amounts of useless ideas (Acar, 2019). A real-life example of this would be: The company BP. Bp experienced disappointment when they decided to enter the crowdsourcing initiative to tackle the Mexican golf catastrophe. Over 100,000 ideas were submitted by crowdsources, and these submissions were evaluated by experts. However, BP couldn’t reach a solution amongst the submissions through crowdsourcing (Dahlander & Piezunka 2020)
Why do crowdsourcing initiations fail?
In most cases, this is due to the company not properly planning the various stages of crowd involvement (Dahlander & Piezunka, 2020).
What steps should be taken to prevent such failures in crowdsourcing?
1) Identify and explain precisely the task that needs to complete (Dahlander & Piezunka, 2020).
2) Market and attracts the initiative to the appropriate contributors (Dahlander & Piezunka, 2020).
3) Select among the submissions received (Dahlander & Piezunka, 2020).
United in crowdsourcing
With the rise of mobile technology and social media, crowdsourcing has fundamentally changed the method in disaster response (Ports Robbins. n.d). Crowdsourcing enables the engagement of communities around the globe, especially when confronted with emergency response and disaster management (Tavra, Racetin & Peroš 2021).
A great example of crowdsourcing during a disaster would be the 2015 Adelaide bushfires. With the use of “geographic information data”, crowdsourcing volunteers around the world helped pinpoint buildings on fire days before on-ground support had access to recover assets (Williamson, 2015).
References
Acar, O 2019, Why Crowdsourcing Often Leads to Bad Ideas, viewed 12 May, 2022, <https://hbr.org/2019/12/why-crowdsourcing-often-leads-to-bad-ideas>.
Brabham, D 2013, Crowdsourcing, MIT Press.
Dahlander, L & Piezunka, H 2020, "Why crowdsourcing fails", Journal of Organization Design, vol. 9, no. 1, viewed 12 May, 2022, <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41469-020-00088-7>.
Hargrave, 2021, How Crowdsourcing Works, viewed 12 May, 2022, <https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/crowdsourcing.asp>.
Ports Robbins, J n.d., Crowdsourcing, viewed 12 May, 2022, <https://preparecenter.org/topic/crowdsourcing/>.
Tavra, M, Racetin, I & Peroš, J 2021, "The role of crowdsourcing and social media in crisis mapping: a case study of a wildfire reaching Croatian City of Split", Geoenvironmental Disasters, vol. 8, no. 1.
Wazny, K 2017, "“Crowdsourcing” ten years in: A review", National Library of Medicine, vol. 7,2, pp. 1-5, <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5735781/>
Williamson, B 2015, Satellites and crowd sourcing helps to find destroyed homes in Adelaide bushfires, viewed 12 May, 2022, <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-21/crowd-sourcing-helps-to-find-fire-destroyed-adelaide-hills-homes/6028208>.
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