A very basic overview of the ideas of crowdsourcing vs wisdom of the crowds.

1. crowdsourcing
vs
wisdom of the crowd
(aka swarm intelligence, collective intelligence)

2. Crowdsourcing:
“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.”
Jeff Howe, WIRED, June 2006

3. Wisdom of the Crowd:
the process of taking into account the
collective opinion of a group of
individuals rather than a single expert to
answer a question.
phrased by James Surowiecki (2004)

4. both:

5. are phenomena of
people working together
through the web

6. turn consumers into
producers

7. can work anonymously
(need no recognized authorship, but it helps)

8. So what’s the
difference?

9. crowdsourcing
can enable
wisdom of the crowd
(but doesn’t have to)

10. “Help me sell photos!”

11. Crowdsourcing
• is a process
• goal: distributing workload from one to
many individuals
• derives meaning from implicit behavior
(“I’m bookmarking this for myself, but
others can use it”)
• fairly simple (& pretty dumb)

12. Crowdsourcing
examples
• social bookmarking (del.icio.us)
• Amazon Mechanical Turk
• (viral) marketing

13. Crowdsourcing looks like

14. Problems?
• quality control
• needs critical mass
• motivation
• ownership & authorship
• ethics and economics (unpaid labor,
anyone?)

15. Wisdom of the crowd
• is a goal (rather than process)
• aims at less, but better output
• aggregates individual knowledge
• diamond in the rough (find the smartest bits)
• four-eyes principle (find the errors)

16. Wisdom of the crowd
• smarter, tougher (needs community,
moderation)
• needs explicit action (“Let’s solve this
problem together”)

17. 4 Key conditions
• Diversity of opinion (each person should
have private information, at least opinion)
• Independence (individuals’ opinions mustn’t
be determined by those around them)
• Decentralization (people are able to
specialize and draw on local knowledge)
• Aggregation (mechanism to turn individual
judgement into collective decisions)
Source: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

18. Wisdom of the crowd
examples
• Wikipedia
• Yahoo Answers
• Who Wants To Be A Millionaire audience poll

19. WotC looks like

20. Problems?
• quality control
• critical mass
• vandalism
• hidden agendas
• ownership & authorship

21. Questions?
(now would be a good time to ask them)

22. Thanks!
More questions?
Peter Bihr
peter@thewavingcat.com
twitter.com/thewavingcat