“Crowdsourcing is a word. We’ll see what it means”

After reading the first AZ articles that were released on Wired it became very clear that the definition of Crowdsourcing is not very straightforward. Especially for a CrowdsourcingDirectory author this is stressful because it underlines the importance of a clear definition: we still have none. So as a precursor to our soon to be written blogpost about our definition of crowdsourcing I give you a summary of the opinions and statements about it I found at Assignment Zero.

Clay Shirky:
“I would say it’s an analogy with outsourcing, in which work previously done by company employees is offered to and performed by a group of people on the Internet”
“What’s new with crowdsourcing is the introduction of financial motivation on the part of people doing the work”
“Wikipedia is not crowdsourced because no one gets paid to work on Wikipedia”
“crowdsourcing is specifically related to outsourcing. It doesn’t mean every place people work together. It means a business not using standard managerial techniques to produce something and instead relying on the crowd to do it”
“I am going to put an open call on the Internet and offer to pay for it, without making these people my employees” — that’s a crowdsourcing model”

Douglas Rushkoff:
“I understand crowdsourcing as kind of an industrial age, corporatist framing of a cultural phenomenon”
“crowdsourcing is a word. And we’ll see what it means” (my favorite)

Charles Leedbeater:
“The particular issue with crowdsourcing I think is the “sourcing” idea. It draws from outsourcing, which implies the crowd is being sourced by an organization for a better solution”

Howard Rheingold:
“non-market-incented commons-based peer production”

Don Tapscott:
the term “crowdsourcing” is restrictive — mass collaboration takes a number of different modes that don’t all involve a “crowd”

Karim Lakhani:
“What we can say in crowdsourcing, or in distributed innovation systems, is that you’re getting paid for performance: Once you’ve shown us what you can do then we will reward you for it”

Jimmy Wales:
“I think there’s something deeply flawed in it if you’re a company who’s thinking about building a Web site, and you think of what you’re doing as crowdsourcing. You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what it’s all about”
“Instead of viewing your customers as customers, the crowdsourcing view views your customers as really badly paid employees. And I think that’s a huge mistake”

Jeff Jarvis:
“I’m not very interested in terms and definitions; they’re meaningless unless you give them meaning” (yeah!)
“I don’t think that crowdsourcing is some limited phenomenon. It is a label given to a new capability brought on by the Internet: the ability to work together to a shared goal”

Jack Jia:
“I think crowdsourcing, up to this point, you can define it as the first generation of Web 2.0, as being very explicit crowdsourcing, which is really forums, blogs, and people coming to write things”

Lionel David:
“Looking at the end-user is the natural trend and crowdsourcing is clearly the next step”

Ben Elowtiz:
“Crowdsourcing is a basic human attribute - by nature we like to work together to produce things of value”
“the value equation on crowdsourcing is not only measured in dollars and cents”

Michael Sikorsky:
“crowdsourcing means mass collaboration occurring with meaning or commercial reason”
“The last thing that I think about when I think of crowdsourcing is the distinction between the wisdom of crowds and the participation of crowds”

Frank Piller:
“The beautiful thing with crowdsourcing and the Internet is that we don’t really need the infrastructure of a company.”
“mass customization and collective customer commitment, are models of crowdsourcing. In mass customization, the crowd is reacting to an open call to design an individual good; in the second, the main focus of participation of crowd is the selection crowdsourcing (product management) task”

Steve Urquhart:
“Crowdsourcing is simply good politics”