Is crowdsourcing reverse plagiarism?

December 3, 2008 | Written by

"No crowd surfing" via clagnut

Vote for crowdSPRING today! (more on that at the end)

I recently predicted that:

Creativity will be crowd-sourced, redefining the role of the professional creative mind. PR will be tasked with orchestrating the crowd talking to itself.

A few questions came in on what crowdsourcing is, and I was surprised to find that the term wasn’t as self-explanatory as I had thought.

According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is the:

Act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.

One might consider Wikipedia itself an experiment in crowdsourcing, although its founder Jimmy Wales is cited in the very same article as having said that:

"I find the term ‘crowdsourcing’ incredibly irritating," Wales says. "Any company that thinks it’s going to build a site by outsourcing all the work to its users not only disrespects the users but completely misunderstands what it should be doing. Your job is to provide a structure for your users to collaborate, and that takes a lot of work."

(source: "The Wales Rules for Web 2.0", Business 2.0)

His distinction would be that Wikipedia has enough of a framework in place to foster productive collaboration rather than willy nilly idea stealing and general run-amokedness.

Despite the controversy around crowd sourcing, Ruder Finn client crowdSPRING has been able to show success in an area particularly prone to debate, creative crowd-sourcing. They are self-described as:

an online marketplace for creative services. For buyers, crowdSPRING is a place to post a creative project, watch the world contribute ideas and choose the one they like. For creatives, crowdSPRING is a global stage for creativity where title and experience don’t matter.

The process is facilitated by a framework established by crowdSPRING to ensure that creators own their ideas, are paid, and have tools at their disposal to ensure that they are protected.

Incidentally, the WIRED Small Biz program is hosting a contest for one of five businesses they’ve selected to win $40,000. Voting is open through this month, so:

Vote for crowdSPRING today!

Have you ever crowdsourced something?

**UPDATE 1**

crowdSPRING is currently in second. Get thee to the polls, readers!

**UPDATE 2**

WIRED contributing editor Jeff Howe has a blog on his book about crowd-sourcing:

Crowdsourcing Blog

Also, the WIRED Small Biz program has a forum for small business owners to pose problems and collaborate to solve them:

WIRED Small Biz forum