Crowdsourcing how to Crowdsource
People are crowdsourcing everything from logo design to crisis management. While many people have heard about crowdsourcing, we get lots of questions about what it can do and how it works.
At Mutopo, we do some crowdsourcing and we also try to figure out how it works. But we’re fortunate that people in the space share a lot of what they are thinking and what is working for them, from their motivation to their tools. Some of our recent sources include: John Winsor, Trada, Jovoto, uTest, bbhlabs, Andrea Meyer, 15inno, Going Social Now, etc.
While I love these resources, I have picked a favorite mainly because it elegantly uses crowdsourcing to understand successful crowdsourcing strategies . The Network Challenge project was run by DARPA and they have been good enough to share a detailed report of their findings (pdf).
DARPA asked people to find 10 tethered weather balloons across the Unites States. What is most striking is that the most successful teams all employed crowdsourcing. Although there were some differences in strategy, there were many more similarities, as a simple summary shows below.
Here are here are some of my favorite learnings (because these are questions we get asked alot):
1. Does it help to start with a strong brand?
It really does. Brands may have been built to get people to purchase, but they are good for recruiting full time talent and part time (even very part time) talent, too.
2. Does media coverage help?
Again, like a strong brand, people need to know that you need help, so getting covered, helps you get coverage of your community needs.
3. Should I use an existing community or recruit a new one?
Seems like either approach can work. If you don’t feel very good about 1 or 2, you might consider approaching an existing community.
4. So we can just sit back and wait for the result?
Probably not. As one of our Mutopo t-shirts say: “this community isn’t going to manage itself”. This really takes quite a bit of work. In this example, multiple people ran an operations center to respond to manage recruiting, manage tasks, deal with trolls, etc. Interacting with 100s or 1000s or people requires some new management approaches.
5. What tools do I need?
There are loads of good ones already. It probably makes sense to see what you can reuse and then focus on the specialized aspects of your task for custom development.
6. Do I need to pay people?
It certainly seem to help, although people participate for all sorts of reasons.
I really love the idea that an organization we expect to be very secretive is experimenting in public and sharing their learnings. Shame on us if we dont try to learn something too and thanks again to DARPA for an elegant enlightening experiment.
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