Two Tales of Crowdsourcery – The Homer and The Rally Fighter
Our first story takes place in the Springfield. It is the story of a car company that sets out to create a new car.
Powell Motors is in need of new ideas. So they turn to Homer, because it is reasoned, he represents the interests of the average American. He should therefore be able to define what he wants in a car. He is given free reign and the result is well, less than what was hoped. In fact, the Powell Motors is forced into bankruptcy and the Simpson’s extended family is torn apart.
Looking at the Homer, now, it is perhaps easy to see what all the fuss is about. I don’t really want one and my guess is, you might not either.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvn9k8dnhjI]
Our second story takes place more than 15 years later, in present day Massachusetts, no where near Springfield. It’s being slowly documented, but this is what we know so far.
Local Motors wants to build C.O.O.L cars. They invite a large community or car enthusiasts to participate in the development of their car. But this is where the similarities with Powell Motors ends, because Local Motors decides to decide differently. While Homer was the decider with rather unfortunately results, Local Motors doesn’t let the community decide everything. The don’t leave them alone to figure things out and show up at the end to see the result.
Local Motors cleverly picks some things to do themselves (chasis design), some to leave to other manufacturers (door handles from a Miata, I think) and then they choose a few areas to get some help (body styling). And then for good measure they borrow some ideas from IKEA for assembly. The people who submit body designs are specialists, but the people giving feedback, encouragement and voting on their favorites are prospective customers.
Seeing the Rally Fighter now, it is easy to see what all the fuss is about. I stopped caring about cars sometime ago, but I want this one.
The Homer, I think most people would agree (aside from Bart, perhaps) was a massive #fail. The Rally Fighter, well it is still too soon to say that this will be a commercial success, but it looks very encouraging.
Local Motors is using crowdsourcing – making very clear choices about where and how they want the crowd involved, how things are owned and they are discussing with the crowd as they go and experimenting to see what works (we love recursiveness almost as much as crowdsourcery). It sounds a lot like the process experiments that saw Linux depart from the traditional processes of its time, or the cleverly organized participation in Wordpress or Mozilla as they go up against traditionally organized competitors.
The Rally Fighter feels like the result of magic. As Arthur C. Clark put it
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This technology is just the artificial, artificial intelligence kind. And it takes some clever experimenting, organizing, tools and people to make it work properly. The story of the Rally Fighter suggest to me, that we should stop looking at Crowdsourcing in the simplistic terms that resulted in the Homer and start to consider that although it may require new organizations, tools and people, it’s very likely to produce magic.
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2 Comments to “Two Tales of Crowdsourcery – The Homer and The Rally Fighter”
[...] Clay Shirky recently offered a fascinating post on the idea of algorithmic authority: Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” On delicious, Shirky also points to “two tales of crowdsourcery.” [...]
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