Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents 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. Thus the term crowdsourcing (a term, for the record, coined jointly by Mark and myself that day, in a fit of back-and-forth wordplay). Our emphasis all along was on the verb, not the noun, a telling and revealing distinction. Mark and I agreed that while the fact of peer production itself was becoming well-documented (witness Wired's early, and astute, take on the phenomenon, by Wired editor Thomas Goetz), no one we were aware of had documented the ways in which corporations were employing intelligent networks to put peer production to work. Later that day I called my editor at Wired, Mark Robinson, and told him I thought there was a broader story that other journalists were missing, ie, that users weren't just making dumb-pet-trick movies, but were poised to contribute in significant and measurable ways in a disparate array of industries.
#Soundbyte definition tv
I had recently been looking into common threads behind the ways advertising agencies, TV networks and newspapers were leveraging user-generated content, and picked that for my topic. In January Wired asked me to give a sort of "reporter's notebook" style presentation to some executives. But before I present my definition of the term, I'd like to provide some backstory and context. Others most certainly will.Īnd indeed, there's no hair-splitting about it. Panning for lumps of gold, while in the other, Three InitialĬorporation is data-mining vast spoilage heaps of almost-useless Hairy-bearded *NIX prospectors are standing hip-deep in the water Mapping the mountains and finding two seams of gold. Would be no mere academic hairsplitting, either. Has a different structure than "commons-based peer production." This I could spend all day trying to explain how Jeff Howe's "crowdsourcing"
Mindful that language is slippery, and meaning itself largely determined by the crowd, I'm content to allow the crowd define the term for itself (in no small part because I'm powerless to stop it.) But I would be remiss if I did not play my own role in that process.īruce Sterling, a fellow writer at Wired and one of the biggest brains in the business, rightfully pointed out yesterday that it's a mistake to treat crowdsourcing as a synonym for peer production: I couldn't be happier with this development, but I'm also noticing that the word is being used somewhat interchangably with Yochai Benkler's concept of commons-based peer production. A stronger argument for the term's adoption, however, is that the it's starting to appear without reference to me or the original article in Wired. Late last week I pointed to a Wikipedia entry as evidence that crowdsourcing had become a bonafide neologism.
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