If you’re not familiar with author and journalist Jeff Howe, you’ll definitely know crowdsourcing, the term he popularized in a 2006 Wired article. Last week, Howe spoke at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society about the incentives for people to participate in crowdsourcing projects. At AboutUs, we were fascinated to see the parallels and the stark differences between Howe’s conception of crowdsourcing and how we view our endeavor. We were also energized to start thinking more deeply about what motivates people to contribute to our site.
Choosing your term
The really pleasant surprise to come out of Howe’s presentation was that he chose to write about crowdsourcing because he “just despised the phrase user-generated content” and “also felt that it didn’t begin to tap the transformation that was actually taking place.” We couldn’t agree more when it comes his feelings about UGC as a moniker for what we do.
However, there are some who feel strongly that dubbing your project as crowdsourcing conveys a feeling of exploitation and an inaccurate picture of how social production works online. Whatever your preferred term, Howe’s cardinal rule is that a focus on what you can do for your community (rather than what your community can do for you) is the key to a successful undertaking of this sort.
For love and money
In discussing incentives for participants in crowdsourced businesses, Howe draws the line sharply between those with monetary incentives and those without. Here at AboutUs, we honestly see both these types of incentives playing a role.
There can be some very real indirect monetary rewards for improving an AboutUs page through increased traffic, and through showing your customers your willingness to work in a transparent way (I’ll be talking tomorrow about how AboutUs can better your reputation). For sites that don’t generate revenue, cultivating a freely-licensed source of knowledge about websites and increasing visibility for the ones you care about personally are the key reasons why we think people taking the plunge and editing AboutUs.
But enough about what we think. If you’ve got an AboutUs account, we’d love to hear why you signed up to edit, or even your general obervations on why you participate in crowdsourced sites.
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I might be a little biased because I am a wiki admin as well, but I maintain my various AboutUs articles for a few reasons:
1. De-duplicating and contributing content to give the AboutUs page and the source page better chances of ranking in search results (primarily for reputation management/SEO).
2. The data are there and aren’t going away. Might as well try to influence it (in the wiki way).
3. I know how hard it can be to get people to contribute and feel ownership on “somebody else’s” site.
I’ll be interested to see others’ comments.
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