For the past decade, the internet has enabled hyper
connectivity through crowdsourcing. Apps like Airbnb, Uber, and Yelp have
brought together crowds of people who were previously disconnected and allowed
them to create business and gather ideas. Here are the pros and cons of
crowdsourcing.
Pros:
Access to resources – Crowdsourcing allows people to bring
together unique skills. Skilled work, such as photography, office work, and
design can be sought. Since everyone has different skills, crowdsourcing lets
more people to access a larger and universal set of resources.
Access to scale – Crowdsourcing gives a business the
opportunity to access a large workforce for specific events with the
flexibility to lower costs.
Transparency – Real world data allows for better user
reviews and ratings, meaning the “bad eggs” will be weeded out quickly. People
can now seek profiles, reviews, and company reputations for products and services
before making a purchase.
Cons:
Cost of management – Outsourcers need to deal with workers
directly which means buyer needs to spend time and money to manage resources
effectively
Creating a fair marketplace – Processes and rules need to be
continuously re-established to take into account unlimited possible user cases (example: concerns over the Waze app to avoid speed traps and police checkpoints)
Quality control – Trust and safety as well as quality of
product/services can be challenging in an environment where people engage with each other directly
1. What are some of your concerns or personal experiences with crowdsourcing apps?
2. What can be done to improve or fix the cons of crowdsourcing?
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator/the-pros-and-cons-of-crowdsourcing/news-story/9ec9c88a62137d0e425bdfecb2c623ff
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator/the-pros-and-cons-of-crowdsourcing/news-story/9ec9c88a62137d0e425bdfecb2c623ff
I really liked your post Tiffany!
ReplyDeleteMy biggest concern with crowdsourcing is the lack of trust of information that can be obtained about the collaborators before they do the work. Most of the time, people working on crowdsourcing projects are complete strangers working virtually, this can exposes the organization to bad actors and criminals.
This issue can be mitigated if the organization using crowdsourcing implements the proper controls during the project. If the collaborators are only given access to parts of the project they need then the organization's risk will be reduced.
Crowdsourcing has many benefits for business or the sponsoring firm/personnel, including access to a mammoth pool of self-driven, willing and cheap workers, who provide instant feedback at little or no overhead fee. It plays a bigger role in marketing as it provides different views from different people with varying preference and taste, which assist in product development and distribution of products in different areas. Crowdsourcing app payments to the members are rather low; this can have a greater impact on the respondent. Adjusting price to reasonable amount will motivate the starters. Credibility and quality of the response can be enhanced by setting up standards of the participants, i.e., age, also putting up a system to ensure that a member cannot own more than one account.
ReplyDeleteI like your post because it’s very easy to see the pros and cons of Crowdsourcing and it helps me to have a deep understanding of it. My concern about crowdsourcing is that because of the labor is cheaper, so I think it’s less credible than professionals. I agree with Garrett that proper controls will help the reduce the concerns among people and the access control is also very important.
ReplyDeleteI think Crowdsourcing is a very interesting use of the internet to bring many people with similar desires together to help create something that they would find useful, fun, or desirably. In many cases, companies that turn to crowdsourcing could not exist without it. I think that one of the most important parts of your post was the issue of quality control in crowdsourcing. One of the biggest issues with online open-source codebases is users attempting to contribute bad, non-functional, or outdated code to the main branch of the software. In fact, it's something I've seen myself while working on these projects. I think an interesting idea would be allowing all users of the codebase to vote on whether or not a perspective new user would be allowed to contribute to the project, or if users could vote on whether or not to allow certain code to be pushed into the main branch. This might be time consuming if it required all users to vote, so maybe only require certain users with elevated status to vote. Whether or not this is possible, I agree the issues of trust and quality control are very important issues in the world of crowdsourcing.
ReplyDelete