In the words of Mugatu in comedy flick Zoolander, crowd-sourcing is “so hot right now”. Dell want to launch a new computer – first thing they do is listen to the needs of the crowd across their Ideastorm crowd-sourcing app. President Obama wants ideas on how to develop up his new Recovery.gov project – first thing he does is run an open Dialogue process with the IT community using the Dialogue App. The Coalition win power in the UK - first thing they do is ask the online community for ideas on their future programme for government. David Cameron presents his new emergency budget to the country – first thing he does, ask the UK’s 1000′s of civil servants for further ideas of how to save money.
So, crowd-sourcing has come of age. It’s moved from the realms of innovation to mainstream. It’s now part of the everyday workings of an organisation – whether it’s business or government. And it’s moved into the mainstream largely because it works. It’s not a fad but a fact. And that’s because the basic model of crowd-sourcing is so simple: many ideas from multiple minds are better than few ideas from few minds.
But the simplicity of the crowd-sourcing model only works if you do it properly. And this is where the “or not” bit comes in. As if you don’t do crowd-sourcing properly you end up with an unscaleable idea mountain. If all you do is ask for ideas in a completely unstructured unmanaged way, then instead of “harnassing the collective intelligence of the people” (to quote President Obama) you end up “pillaging the minds of the masses” (to quote me).
As the smartness of crowd-sourcing lies in the empowerment of the crowd to help solve the problem for you, not simply in providing a bottomless ideas suggestion box. And this empowerment comes from the tools provided. Any meaningful crowd-sourcing process will use an app which allows the crowd to not only suggest ideas, but to also rate, comment and tag other people’s ideas. And it’s the last bit – the tagging, where much of the value lies, as community tagging allows the ideas to become so much more useful – especially in a scenario where you’ve got 10′s of thousands of ideas, which will rapidly become impossible to make sense of.
So, yes crowd-sourcing is exciting. Yes, business and government should be doing more of it. But, this all comes with a warning – don’t under-value people’s ideas by running a poorly structured and managed process, otherwise there is a threat that your whole process may be devalued and the virtues of the crowd may turn.
[Plug alert: for awesome policy crowd-sourcing toolery, check out www.Dialogue-app.com]
