Crowdsouring is a topic mulling around in my head lately. In part because Assignment Zero is coming to a close. Also because I’m helping Jeff Howe research for his book on the topic.
Crowdsourcing, when broken down, can be considered the biggest business story since the assembly line. In fact, when people ask me "well, what IS crowdsourcing." I usually just tell them: It’s the expansion of the assembly line through the Internet.
But, I digress.
How Jeff Howe describes it (and he coined the phrase, so I’ll defer to his definition):
The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a
job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee)
and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in
the form of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
Okay.
So for organizations like iStockPhoto — a clear example of crowdsourcing — it makes perfect sense. Magazine photos were traditionally produced by a select few. Today, that market has opened up and anyone can sell photos to a professional magazine via crowd powered middle-men like iStockPhoto.
So far, so good.
But what needs further refining is the soundbyte — that crowdsourcing is the "application of OS principles to fields outside of software." Jeff is onto something — but in the end, I think it’s better to focus in on exactly what principle it is that crowdsourcing relies on.
The revolutionary aspect of open source is the effect of standing on other people’s shoulders. There is a crowdsourcing element to it all — anyone can add to the code, not just people in-house, but the real power comes from the collection and aggregation of knowledge/work/products over time. Point is: IT’S A COLLABORATION.
I just don’t see this in iStockPhotography, Innocentive, Mechanical Turk or some of the other go-to examples of crowdsourcing. The process of creating a product is opened up. Yes. Communities might even spring up in the process. But are the crowds of people collaborating?
Crowdsourcing is a part of open source — but open source itself is much
broader. And I don’t think Jeff means for crowdsourcing to replace open
source as a term. He is right — there are certain principles of open
source that are spreading beyond the field of software. Specifically,
the act of opening up and accepting work from people who aren’t designated agents (employees of a
company) to do a set amount of work.
But that is just one principle of open source. There are others. In the early days of NewAssignment.Net I asked Roy Shestowitz (my resident OS guru) to draw some analogies on how open source can inform journalism.
I find/believe that forward thinking news organizations are ready (and are starting) to embrace crowdsourcing with open arms.
This is a natural first step. It happens even without their consent,
when bloggers act as fact checkers. Entire news organizations are
springing up at the hyperlocal level which rely solely on citizen
journalism content. NowPublic is not ashamed to say that they are a
news organization "powered by the crowd."
Fantastic.
Crowdsourced journalism can work. My experience with
Assignment Zero only confirms it for me. There is a large population of
people that want to produce content. All they need is a news
organization that 1. invites them in and 2. Gives them a topic they can
sink their teeth into. (Of course, those main two points are broken down into 50 more steps that need to be followed, but you get the idea).
But what about the other principles of open source? What about the sharing of information across news organizations? When can people collaborate?
I’m not knocking NowPublic — but in some respects all they are is a blog aggregator. Same can be said for a dozen or so citizen journalism ventures. Their content is essentially: "Here’s a CJ take on this event." And "here’s a CJ take on another event." Rinse, repeat.
What I’m interested in is when the combining the different CJ contributions can add up to be more than the sum of its parts.
But why even start with citizen journalism? You have to crawl before you can slam dunk.
Why can’t news organizations share information with each other?
We come back to the scoop. The staple of journalism that tells
reporters to covet their sources, covet any information they have. Just
as proprietary hackers would covet whatever programs they concocted.
My question still stands. Is there a way for news organizations to
cover a subject locally — but share the information so that (a. They
still serve their local readers (b. they can distribute the information
amongst other news organizations covering the same subject the same way
(c. By sharing — information adds up to be greater than the sum of its
parts.
I ask this again because I recently chatted with someone who is in
charge of a network of papers. There are plenty of these chains.
McClatchy, Gannet, ANA, etc etc. Even smaller newspaper chains sometimes have 5-8 tiny local papers and a Web presence.
Hey, I can understand why papers from competing companies might
not want to share information. The rebel in me might disagree and say:
you should share info anyways, but I can at least understand where they
are coming from. But if you are a newspaper chain — distributed across the
country. Why aren’t your reporters working together to cover a story? Citizen journalism aside — this just makes sense!
If you have 10 reporters in 10 cities — why not have them all cover the same story with a local angle. Then, aggregate the reporting they have and get a re-write guy.
If this open source (the sharing of information) is successful, then I imagine it will only be easier to open the doors wide open so that those 10 reporters are now working with 50 volunteers in their 10 cities. Then you can really start to collect data.
END DREAM HERE.
Is there something I’m missing in my young naivete?
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Hi Dave, I like your post! “Is there a way?” Yes, I think so… But I think the problem is that radical innovations are rarely coming from incumbent firms. The newspaper corporations are built on a business model that doesn’t fit the CJ-model very well. We need a business model for citizen journalism that is a true threat to the large newspaper for them to be even willing to change. Probably a lot of them won’t be able to change and will eventually die.
What about Assignment Zero, do you think it threatens traditional media?
There probably should be more collaboration within the news industry than there is. But I think sometimes people think things or situations are newer or more dramatic than they are.
To some extent, news organizations already share their work (both the labor and the product), through chains and wire services in general and The Associated Press in particular.
Maybe one reason they don’t do it more and set up the model more as you describe is that it might not be as efficient to do so as you think.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say a news chain could do this 10 times better than Assingment Zero did. How many dollars and how many man-hours went into Assignment Zero?