Essay on Crowdsourcing
It is really difficult to imagine nowadays that there were times, when computers simply didn’t exist – they were not invented yet. Thus absolutely all operations were executed by people, with involvement of purely human resources, irrespective of the task. Then the times came, when the computers were created, the first ones got the name – Automatic Computers. Correspondingly, a lot of routine activities and tasks were passed to them, this means, that machines have actually started to perform some of the human’s functions, using the Artificial Intelligence. Further on we are going to discuss the term of crowdsourcing, its major characteristics, advantages and draw backs.
Explaining the notion of crowdsourcing, it is necessary to mention, that the main concept of the process – is the obtaining of some services or information, some content or other types of contributions, via involving of huge groups of people, mostly based on the creations of online communities, instead of getting this information and ideas from concrete employees. Rather often the notion of crowdsourcing is studied in relation to the names of Robinson and Howe, who was a writer and an editor at Wired Magazine. They were the first individuals to use this term in the year 2005, during their discussion of the application of the Internet for various types of businesses (Howe 2008). The phrase “outsourcing to the crowd” they quickly transformed into the notion “crowdsourcing”. A year later a more concrete definition of this term was published, stating that crowdsourcing is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals” (Ess 2010). Crowdsourcing gained popularity, which certainly could be explained by several sufficiently important advantages, it was able to bring to businesses and their development. First of all this practice provided the possibility to have access to talented and originally-thinking individuals from all over the world. Secondly, there is a chance to study the product from an absolutely different perspective in comparison to those of specialists, working over some concrete problem or innovation for some certain period of time already. Also one of the advantages is related to the number of individuals, working over some problem and performing some task, instead of one or two workers of the company only. Finally, the more people are involved into the process, the more chances to gather sufficient and original information are available.
“Crowdsourcing can involve division of labor for tedious tasks split to use crowd-based outsourcing, but it can also apply to specific requests, such as crowdfunding, a broad-based competition, and a general search for answers, solutions, or a missing person” (Ess 2010). According to the statistical researches, more than 50 % of all business companies all over the world apply crowdtesting, as one of the major techniques for better development of their products. This practice certainly presumes the provision of software testing services.
It is necessary to take into consideration the fact that there are not only advantages, which are related to application of crowdsourcing, logically there are also several major controversies. It was already mentioned that the huge number of new ideas coming is rather an advantage, at the same time it is necessary to remember, that idea itself costs nothing, as long as there is no financial possibility to develop and implement it. This means that all crowdsourcing projects need involvement of capital. At the same time this number of ideas has certainly a huge potential for revealing of really interesting ones, however some of these good ideas “get lost” in the crowd, and are not used due to various reasons. In case the crowdworkers get the tasks, which are split into some minor tasks, they are paid for performing of them, this leads to the situation, when they feel the need just to perform as many tasks as possible, just with the aim of earning more money. There is a strong necessity to verify the responses, thus there are additional resources and additional time involved, which certainly has negative impact upon expenses distribution. Taking also in consideration the lack of sufficient interaction with direct clients, it is possible to assume, that crowdsourcing is rather risky for the final quality of a product.
Overall, this paper is devoted to such wide-spread practice as crowdsourcing; having provided the general historical information in relation to the subject, along with the definition of the notion, we have also studied the major advantages of crowdsourcing, which explain its wide application in the modern business world; at the same time we have briefly overlooked the possible problems, related to the process of passing of concrete tasks to crowds and computers, instead of performing of them by concrete individual workers, even under the condition of splitting of the tasks into some minor portions of work.
Do you like this essay?
Our writers can write a paper like this for you!
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading...