• What motivates the contributors in crowdsourced efforts? Specifically, to what extent are monetary incentives a driver as compared to extra-monetary ones?
• What about “crowdsourced” projects which are not creative or knowlege-worker oriented, but outsourced menial labor?
• How can or should “creatives” respond to the rise of crowdsourced alternatives?

Jeff Howe at Berkman Center on Crowdsourcing

It’s long – just over an hour – but really worth your time if you’re interested in the issue of value that crowdsourcing raises. I especially enjoyed the extended Q & A session – which benefits from the collective wisdom and critical thought typical of Berkman attendees.

Howe admits a kind of radical ambivalence about the phenomenon of crowdsourcing and the ways in which it disrupts some existing relationships by changing the value of certain kinds of labor.

His ambivalence comes through in two ways. First, he focuses on the “creative” end of crowdsourcing – examples like Threadless, Innocentive, and iStockPhoto – rather than the “menial” end of crowdsourcing – Mechanical Turk’s “Human Intelligence Tasks” like transcription, solving CAPTCHA’s for spammers, etc. How does the equation for crowdsourcing change when your imagined participant isn’t the “college kid designing t-shirts” but people in developing markets doing work for fractions of pennies?

Howe confesses he essentially ignored Mechanical Turk (and other arguably non-creative examples of leveraging large scale online labor) in the book – in essence because it didn’t fit, in his mind, the picture of motivation he saw in the phenomenon in which he was interested. But are there really two fundamentally different models of crowdsourcing at play here, or is it just two different participating labor pools: one predominantly first world, leisure class, participating for fun and recognition, and another more developing world centered, participating for financial gain?

Second, he’s also deeply sympathetic with those – increasingly including his fellow journalists – who are arguably displaced by the impact of crowdsourcing on the value of what they produce. What about established professionals in the field who see the market value of their work decimated in the process? On the other hand, what about those trying to break into the market, who have always found spec work a valuable mechanism for demonstrating their skills before gaining professional, full time employment?

It’s especially interesting where these two issues come together – crowdsourcing for employement. What if anybody, anywhere, with any standard of living, could do your job and compete with your for your value?

There’s a good, well edited video summary from a panel Howe moderated at SXSW 2009 on this topic, specifically focused on spec work in creative fields, and sites like Crowdspring and 99designs:

I’m reminded of the debate among programmers about offshoring, in which similar arguments still go on. Can the quality of the design produced at a crowdsourced spec site ever compete with that produced by a reputable, professional shop? How can a design that doesn’t come out of an intimate, strategic, and interative process involving lots of face time and discussion with the client ever be truly on target? On the other hand, if the consumer of said work can’t tell the difference, and the price is several orders of magnitude less, does it make sense to continue to argue they should pay the premium?

(See No!Spec for more on the arguments about the dangers of speculative work).

Finally, I also saw Howe give a version of this talk at Media Bistro’s Circus event in New York during Internet Week, a few months after the Berkman Center talk. In his Media Bistro talk, Howe focused much more directly on crowdsourcing in journalism, highlighting as an example the excellent work being done at Spot.us, a kind of crowd-funding mechanism for journalists.

Ironically, to see that video, you’ll need to subscribe to MediaBistro OnDemand, for $19/month or $180/yr. Apparently the downward pressure of crowdsourcing and free video from various sources (Berkman, SXSW) hasn’t yet forced MediaBistro to share videos from their conferences for free.

Does that make his talk at MediaBistro more valuable than the talk at the Berkman center or the panel at SXSW?

The first half of the study results from qualitative interviews with “experts on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation”, specifically:

• Eric von Hippel
• Yochai Benkler
• Jimmy Wales
• Michel Bauwens
• Siva Vaidhyanathan
• John Howkins
• Mitch Kapor

The second half of the study focuses on Second Life as a case study or example of the impact of user-led innovation in actual practice.

I like the basic framing of the argument in the first section, which is that “user-generated content represents just the tip-of-the-iceberg”:

participatory culture . . . has the potential to reshape our economy and society. . . . user-led developments encompass a much wider field of collaborative practices and production processes. . . . other forms of ‘citizen product design’ are catering to people’s desire for personalised consumer goods.

They go on to suggest that “the blurring of producer and consumer roles is changing the way companies innovate and gives users a much greater say in product and service design.”

The most problematic part of the report for me is this description of Open Source:

One of the most important and successful forms of distributed capitalism in action is the Open Source software movement. The brainchild of Finnish university student Linus Torvalds, Open Source emerged out of his pioneering efforts to develop a sophisticated feedback system of network-enabled collaboration, culminating in the Linux operating system. Torvalds wrote the Linux code in conjunction with thousands of other keen codevelopers, laying the groundwork for future Open Source projects. This created an ingenious process for software development that utilised the ‘collective intelligence’ of other users, and harnessed the power of distributed knowledge production, transfer and exchange.

This wipes away with one rhetorical brush the Free Software Foundation and the GNU toolkit on which Linux relied and continues to rely, and basically credits Linus with inventing not just Linux but the whole movement. (Let alone any of the other precursors to Free software, among academics, in hobbyist communities, and so on – see the Wikipedia entry on the history of free software). A bit of editing and a footnote to the broader Free Software movement would go along way here.

The other issue with the report is that it is a bit like reading the condensed version of the thinkers identified above – which I guess is a by-product of the interview methodology.

But for those who have no intent of slogging through The Wealth of Networks or Democratizing Innovation (or, for that matter, the easier-going but still highly insightful Convergence Culture), the report does an excellent job of framing the major issues.