What first strikes the reader about Crowdsourcing is how small it is, both physically and in word count. Yet, writing in an easy, almost chatty, style with not a diagram or table in sight, Daren Brabham (a researcher in online communities and teacher of public relations at the University of Southern California) provides a brief but fascinating introduction to a phenomenon that seems made for the Internet – at least by his definition. A brief introduction gives an equally brief description of crowdsourcing as a “deliberate blend of bottom up, open, creative with top-down organizational goals”; Brabham expands on this – and in the process, considerably narrows – this definition as he works through the four sections of the book.
The section titled Concepts, Theories and Cases of Crowdsourcing begins with Brabham expanding on the four key features of crowdsourcing:
an organisation with a problem to be solved, and that directs the process of finding the solution;
a “crowd”/community prepared to voluntarily take on the task;
mutual benefit to both parties; and
an online venue where it all takes place.
The essential idea is that the locus of control rests between the organisation and the community, distinguishing crowdsourcing from other modes of operation. Surprisingly, this means that what at first seem like obvious examples of crowdsourcing, such as open-source production of content (e.g. Wikipedia) are not crowdsourcing by Brabham's definition, because the organisation does not determine what is to be produced (e.g. Wikipedia does not tell contributors what topics to write about).
In the next section, Organising Crowdsourcing, Brabham offers his classification of types of crowdsourcing based on the type of problem to be solved: knowledge discovery and management, “broadcast search” (where the organisation asks the crowd simply to “find a solution” to an empirical problem), peer-vetted creative production and “distributed human intelligence gathering” (the crowd must analyse large amounts of information, e.g. photographs, that a computer might struggle with). In the third section, Issues in Crowdsourcing, Brabham asks, Why do people do it? There is no single motivation: making money, finding friends, developing skills, filling in the evening are all reported motivations. What kind of person becomes part of a “crowd”? Brabham finds that in many cases successful crowdsourcing does not involve groups of rank amateurs finding solutions where professionals cannot: instead, crowdsourced scientific problems are often solved by scientists or people with scientific qualifications, and crowdsourced t-shirt designs are often the work of graphic designers – all utilising their professional skills in a crowdsourcing environment. Crowdsourcing also raises a variety of legal and ethical issues, from the fairly obvious need to clarify who owns the copyright to any work produced to the labour rights of crowd members.
Brabham's last section addresses the future of crowdsourcing. Not surprisingly, he sees it as becoming more common, with the development of crowdsourcing platforms as business solutions, and the rise of a new profession of online community management. Crowdsourcing is already being applied successfully to a wide range of situations (e.g. earthquake reporting, patent reviewing, producing government policy) and unsuccessfully to others (journalism), and it seems likely that it will become more common as technological advancement make it easier to manage and participate in it. Brabham's brief and breezy book provides a clear and lucid introduction to crowdsourcing in all its guises, and one that can be read in only a sitting or two.
