By Jeff Howe
(Reviewed by Kevin Knebl)

This great book is mandatory reading for business people who want to understand the effect of online collaboration, social networking, and some of the powerful business applications available to forward-thinking innovators. As a writer for Wired Magazine, Howe is a black belt in technology. I’ve read his work for years; he’s about as in touch as you can be. He even coined the term crowdsourcing in 2006.
 
Crowdsourcing is the term for 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. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology; carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design); refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm; or help capture, systematize, or analyze large amounts of information. The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

In some cases, those who do the labor are well compensated. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from small businesses that are unknown to the initiating organization.

Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include (1) exploration of problems at comparatively little cost, (2) establishment of results-based payment incentives, and (3) the possibility of tapping a wider range of talent than might be present within the initiating organization.

The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to the public rather than another body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open sourcing is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing, the activity is initiated by a client, and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis.