The other morning, I was reading through my feed of people I follow on Twitter, and I came across this tweet by John Maeda, the current President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
I’ve spent some time since then thinking about whether I agree with Mitchell’s statement or not. What she said really isn’t an unfair assumption. Any reasonable person could conclude that when a group of people are presented with more and more things to do, eventually that group will tire from the tasks they’re incented to complete.
Without hearing the statement firsthand to better understand the context, or even be able to debate the point in person, it was important for me to try to understand how that conclusion could be assumed in order to put my thoughts together. In other words, what common misconceptions about crowdsourcing would lead to this conclusion?
Here’s what I came up with…
I like to think of a crowd as citizens living in a city (and the city itself is a business). The success of a city is defined by its ability to adapt to the needs of its current set of citizens. At the same time, a city is not defined by how well its citizens perform together as a group (beyond their ability to cohabitate peacefully), but by the collective successes of its individuals.
In other words: The success of a crowdsourced business is defined by its ability to adapt to the needs of its crowd/community. At the same time, a crowdsourced business is not defined by how well its crowd performs together as a group, but defined by the collective successes of its individuals.
A defined, finite group of people are a team – not a crowd. This is a common misunderstanding and it’s important to note the difference. Unlike crowds, teams suffer from the “weakest link” problem. While members of both teams and crowds work towards a common goal, the crowd is made up of people who stand to gain on an individual level, whereas with the team, every member experiences the same outcome from their collective efforts – all or nothing – in synchronicity. Unlike a team, a crowd is not greater than the sum of its parts.
As citizens move away and new ones move in, the city simply changes. Like a city, a crowdsourced business doesn’t control the crowd, it manages the parameters the crowd works within. These parameters include what the outcome of the crowd’s efforts are, as well as the incentive for participating. These parameters aren’t solid walls – they’re invisible boundaries that allow fatigued members leave and new members to join. Sometimes there’s a large influx of new people, sometimes there’s a sizeable exodus.
Threadless, for example, isn’t defined by the size of its community, but by quality of the designs that come from the community, the incentives we create for participation, and what we do with the product of the crowd’s efforts. If Threadless lost a significant portion of it’s participating community in a single day, the business wouldn’t fail, it would simply change. (Note: that isn’t to say that we wouldn’t be extremely sad. We love you, please don’t leave.)
The reality is, crowds don’t get fatigued, people do. It’s up to a business to create incentives that outweigh fatigue for individuals in order to try to maintain the health of the crowd as a whole.
4 Comments
Right on man, nice post. And yes, please don’t leave us Threadless community!
I think you’re right in the sense that the crowd doesn’t fatigue. But I think a different aspect to consider might be whether or not the crowd moves on. Threadless is a great example of crowd-sourcing that works., but what about some of the things that are being labeled crowd-sourcing that are inherently one-sided, like spec-work sites. Eventually one or both sides of the crowd figure out there’s not much in it for them and they move on. But maybe examples like that were never really true crowd-sourcing in the first place
Grant, you bring up a good point. Crowds can move on. In fact, crowds may not fatigue (as a result of the fact that they don’t act as a unit), but they certainly can die. As it pertains to examples where the crowdsourced task is one-sided – that is still crowdsourcing. There’s no rule that builds morality into the idea, it’s just commonly associated because inherent in a healthy and successful crowd is trust. I’d argue that a crowd with immense turn-over isn’t a successful one, even if it serves its purpose for the business.
I really like this subject, I was one of the people who initially caused a stir on the SvN blog when a recent Screens Around Town was posted with crowdSPRING in the subject. While, I think before I begin, I will state the end result, I must say that I didn’t know how much of a ruckus I was causing. We all have to understand we have our own opinions of things and most people are out to be the business man and not the house to hold the community. But, that’s the end, and not the beginning. Overall, I think more businesses need to pay attention to their impact. The impact their actions are going to cause on an industry or all of the people living in the same country (teams, citizens, what-have-you, all members of the same country or industry). While my opinion of crowd sourcing is more and more laid back due to the flop sided mindset of it. I do think that the trend of the business model will eventually fall or cause issues in it’s defined industry (design, logo, web). All in all, your statement about quality is the best part, if you concentrate on quality as your goal, your business model has changed, and your impact as a business will also change. Most of which is for the better. It will be interesting to see how this trend (when more and more businesses pop up, I call it a trend) will turn out. Thanks for writing this great article!