Highlights from Crowdsourcing For Dummies by David Alan Grier

My main interests are artificial intelligence and collective intelligence, and the ways that they interact. This book introduces common forms of crowd-sourcing, and how to incorporate them into business operations.

Here I highlight a few most useful points, to give you about a quarter of the benefit of reading the whole book. The rest of the book is full of many more great ideas, and is well worth reading.

Top 5 Points

This book describes ways to crowd-source different parts of a project. The various forms can be combined together to crowd-source almost every aspect of work.

Crowdfunding

"Crowdfunding is about raising money... from a large crowd of people."

Crowd-funding crowdsources the earliest stage of a project, the collection of investment money to pay workers. It is similar to an Initial Public Offering, but for a project that is not yet an established business.

Use an existing online platform for crowd-funding (and for most all crowd-sourcing) to find a matching crowd, and to ensure that proper financial practices are applied. Next, get initial contributions from friends and family, to demonstrate social proof that your project is worth investment. Throughout the project, communicate accomplishments to the crowd of funders.

Crowdcontests

"ask the members of the crowd to submit their best work, you choose the best submission and then reward the person who did it."

A crowd-contest crowdsources the task of finding the best person to execute a project. Crowd-contests usually only work for short-term projects, since participants are reluctant to spend large amounts of time and effort for some uncertain reward. A common application is innovation contests, seeking a novel solution or insight.

To motivate participants at the beginning, announce how top performers will be rewarded and publicized. At the end, grant rewards for the top few solutions, and for any solutions that are used in part.

Macrotasking

"Crowdsourcing is a way of bringing new talent into an organisation."

"Macro-tasking" is hiring a remote contract worker to execute a longer-term project requiring special skills. Like hiring a full-time employee, finding a well qualified freelancer is challenging, so check candidates' portfolio and former employers. Throughout, monitor and motivate the work with ongoing communication. At the end, disputes may arise over whether the work was completed, whether compensation was delivered, and whether intellectual property was handled correctly.

Microtasking

"break your job into tasks"

"Micro-tasking" is the most familiar form of crowdsourcing, where a large project is broken into many small homogenous tasks, each performed by a different online worker. Start by providing very clear instructions, since paying more per task will not improve results if workers are unable to perform the tasks as you have explained them. Then check that tasks are completed correctly, by comparing sample results to a known correct results, or by comparing results from one worker to results from another worker.

Self-organised crowds

"learn things from the crowd that you can’t imagine"

Self-organized crowds crowdsource the work of integrating many different workers' output. This ad-hoc cooperation is most useful for gathering local information, then analyzing it. However, the crowd may not prioritize accurate information, unless there is a way to reward accuracy, such as a prediction market.

Top Stand-Alone Quotes

These are the most enlightening book quotes which speak for themselves.

"Crowdsourcing helps workers overcome the limitations of place, time and creativity."

"When crowdsourcing fails, you usually find failed communications at the heart"

"the crowd sometimes loves a good story more than it loves the truth."

"with personnel issues. Be clear. Be polite. Stick to the facts. Say only what you need to say. Avoid emotion."