R2: Crowdsourcing Response

Crowdsourcing is definitely an awesome, unexpected use of the technology that has been created in  the last ten or fifteen years.  Listening to Jimmy Wales talk from 2005 about the wisdom and care that he took setting up Wikipedia as an open source platform is fascinating.  Even after ten years, Wikipedia is still one of the most ubiquitous and useful sites on the Internet...I couldn't even count the number of times that I have used it.  And I agree, it is way better than the Encarta 2004 on CD that I remember using in elementary school.  So many different people donating their time and knowledge to Wikipedia has created something that, like the "What is crowdsourcing?" article mentioned, is of much bigger scope and better quality than one company or group of people could fathom.  And it was also done much more easily and much more quickly.

Although things like Wikipedia and Amazon Mechanical Turk have been around since the early to mid-2000's, I feel like "crowdsourcing" has kind of become a buzzword in the past five years, for better or for worse.  Crowdsourcing projects are more numerous that I realized, once I stopped to think about those I could name.  I'd argue that Apple deciding to open up their app store to independent developers is a form of crowdsourcing - it definitely gives smart phone app consumers more choice and quality.  And then there are even more practical uses for crowdsourcing, like calling for volunteers to comb through images to find the missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370 or SETI's crowdsourced search for extraterrestrial life.

Now, it's almost expected that any friend who is working on a new film, potato salad recipe, or any other kind of project will blast on social media, "Please donate to my Kickstarter!"  There are a lot of Youtube videos and even some feature films that celebrate the ability to join many geographically discontiguous Internet users together in new ways, like Nat Geo's Life in a Day time capsule documentary, The Johnny Cash Project website, the virtual choir, Tiffany Shlain's Let it Ripple series that we read about, etc.  I hate to say it, but it's getting to the point where it is almost gimmicky - sometimes these projects just become virtual noise, featured on Youtube's homepage, blasted on Facebook, or (if they are really past their prime) featured on Good Morning America for a day and then gone from the collective Internet meme radar forever.  Companies are even crowdsourcing their advertising with Instagram picture hashtag contests that encourage users to post their own pictures of their products.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying these ideas aren't cool or unique or worthy, just that there are a lot of them.  I wonder if crowdsourcing as an art form is really here to stay, like Tiffany Shlain says, or if it is just a fad.  Even for the more practical applications, it is still questionable.  Will Wikipedia exist forever?  It requires constant upkeep.  It makes me wonder what the "next big thing" in digital technology workflow will be.