Issue 14.06 - June 2006
Subscribe to WIRED magazine and receive a FREE gift!

The Rise of Crowdsourcing 

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.
By Jeff Howe Page 4 of 4 

Seeing that the company’s most successful products were a result of collaboration between different divisions, Huston figured that even more cross-pollination would be a good thing. Meanwhile, P&G; had set a goal of increasing the number of innovations acquired from outside its walls from 15 percent to 50 percent. Six years later, critical components of more than 35 percent of the company’s initiatives were generated outside P&G.; As a result, Huston says, R&D; productivity is up 60 percent, and the stock has returned to five-year highs. “It has changed how we define the organ-ization,” he says. “We have 9,000 people on our R&D; staff and up to 1.5 million researchers working through our external networks. The line between the two is hard to draw.”

* Story Tools

* Story Images

Click thumbnails for full-size image:


* Rants + Raves

* START

* PLAY

* Posts

P&G; is one of InnoCentive’s earliest and best customers, but the company works with other crowdsourcing networks as well. YourEncore, for example, allows companies to find and hire retired scientists for one-off assignments. NineSigma is an online marketplace for innovations, matching seeker companies with solvers in a marketplace similar to InnoCentive. “People mistake this for outsourcing, which it most definitely is not,” Huston says. “Outsourcing is when I hire someone to perform a service and they do it and that’s the end of the relationship. That’s not much different from the way employment has worked throughout the ages. We’re talking about bringing people in from outside and involving them in this broadly creative, collaborative process. That’s a whole new paradigm.”

4. The Masses

In the late 1760s, a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgang von Kempelen built the first machine capable of beating a human at chess. Called the Turk, von Kempelen’s automaton consisted of a small wooden cabinet, a chessboard, and the torso of a turbaned mannequin. The Turk toured Europe to great acclaim, even besting such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon. It was, of course, a hoax. The cabinet hid a flesh-and-blood chess master. The Turk was a fancy-looking piece of technology that was really powered by human intelligence. Which explains why Amazon.com has named its new crowdsourcing engine after von Kempelen’s contraption. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a Web-based marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks computers are generally lousy at – identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product descriptions, transcribing podcasts. Amazon calls the tasks HITs (human intelligence tasks); they’re designed to require very little time, and consequently they offer very little compensation – most from a few cents to a few dollars.

InnoCentive and iStockphoto are labor markets for specialized talents, but just about anyone possessing basic literacy can find something to do on Mechanical Turk. It’s crowdsourcing for the masses. So far, the program has a mixed track record: After an initial burst of activity, the amount of work available from requesters – companies offering work on the site – has dropped significantly. “It’s gotten a little gimpy,” says Alan Hatcher, founder of Turker Nation, a community forum. “No one’s come up with the killer app yet.” And not all of the Turkers are human: Some would-be workers use software as a shortcut to complete the tasks, but the quality suffers. “I think half of the people signed up are trying to pull a scam,” says one requester who asked not to be identified. “There really needs to be a way to kick people off the island.”

Peter Cohen, the program’s director, acknowledges that Mechanical Turk, launched in beta in November, is a work in progress. (Amazon refuses to give a date for its official launch.) “This is a very new idea, and it’s going to take some time for people to wrap their heads around it,” Cohen says. “We’re at the tippy-top of the iceberg.”

A few companies, however, are already taking full advantage of the Turkers. Sunny Gupta runs a software company called iConclude just outside Seattle. The firm creates programs that streamline tech support tasks for large companies, like Alaska Airlines. The basic unit of iConclude’s product is the repair flow, a set of steps a tech support worker should take to resolve a problem.

Most problems that iConclude’s software addresses aren’t complicated or time-consuming, Gupta explains. But only people with experience in Java and Microsoft systems have the knowledge required to write these repair flows. Finding and hiring them is a big and expensive challenge. “We had been outsourcing the writing of our repair flows to a firm in Boise, Idaho,” he says from a small office overlooking a Tully’s Coffee. “We were paying $2,000 for each one.”

As soon as Gupta heard about Mechanical Turk, he suspected he could use it to find people with the sort of tech support background he needed. After a couple of test runs, iConclude was able to identify about 80 qualified Turkers, all of whom were eager to work on iConclude’s HITs. “Two of them had quit their jobs to raise their kids,” Gupta says. “They might have been making six figures in their previous lives, but now they were happy just to put their skills to some use.”

Gupta turns his laptop around to show me a flowchart on his screen. “This is what we were paying $2,000 for. But this one,” he says, “was authored by one of our Turkers.” I ask how much he paid. His answer: “Five dollars.”

Contributing editor Jeff Howe (jeff_howe@wiredmag.com) wrote about MySpace in issue 13.11.
To read more about crowdsourcing, please visit Jeff Howe’s blog on the subject.
[Print story][E-mail story]  Page 4 of 4