Page 263 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

248 8 Social Enterprise and Other Social Commerce Topics

through best practices and education (see crowdsortium. Successfully Deployed Crowdsourcing
org). Systems: Some Representative
Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem- Examples
solving mechanism for governments and nonprofit use via
community participation. Urban and transit planning are The following are some representative examples of imple-
prime areas for crowdsourcing. One project used crowdsourc- mented crowdsourcing systems.
ing to encourage public participation in the planning process
for the Salt Lake City transit system. Another notable appli-
cation of crowdsourcing to government problem- solving is • Dell’s IdeaStorm (ideastorm.com) enables cus-
the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the tomers to vote on Dell’s product features they pre-
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, see peertopatent.org. fer, including new ones. Dell is using a technically
Progressive companies and organizations now recognize oriented crowd, such as the Linux (linux.org) com-
the value of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd to capture munity. The crowd submits ideas and sometimes
the best answers and the most innovative ideas. members of the community vote on them.
Crowdsourcing can be used for many purposes. For an • Procter and Gamble’s researchers post their prob-
overview, see Zoref (2015). lems at innocentive.com, and at ninesigma.com,
offering cash rewards to problem solvers. P&G uses
other crowdsourcing service providers such as
The Process of Crowdsourcing yourencore.com.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) is a mar-
The process of crowdsourcing, which was described briefly ketplace for distributing large scale work that requires
in Chapter 2, differs from application to application depend- human intelligence. It is limited to large tasks that
ing on the models of the specific problem to be solved and can be divided (known as HITs—human intelligence
the method used. However, the following steps exist in most tasks) and is posted by companies that need assistance.
enterprise applications, even though the details of the execu- Then, Amazon arranges workers (the “Mechanical
tion differ. The major steps are based on the generic process Turk Workers”), each of whom is allocated a small
described in Chapter 2. They are: subtask, and is paid when the work is completed. For
details, see mturk.com.
• Facebook (facebook.com) used crowdsourcing to
translate its site into more than 65 different languages.
1. Identify the task (problem) you want to investigate The completion of the English to French translated by
or accomplish. over 4000 volunteers only took 1 day; however,
2. Select the target crowd. Facebook had to hire a team of professional transla-
3. Broadcast the task to the crowd. (Frequently to an tors to oversee the whole crowdsourcing process to
unidentified crowd in an open call, as Starbucks and ensure that the resulting translations were accurate.
Dell do.) • Goldcorp (goldcorp.com), a Canadian mining
4. Engage the crowd in accomplishing the task (e.g., company, was unable to find sufficient gold. In
idea generation). 2000, the company initiated an open call to the pub-
5. Collect the user-generated content. (This may include lic, providing geological data and a $575,000 in
a submission of solutions, voting, new ideas, etc.) prizes to participants with the best methods. Using
6. Evaluate the quality of submitted material—by the the submitted ideas, the company discovered $3 bil-
management that initiated the request, by experts, lion worth of gold.
or by the crowd. • Frito-Lay (fritolay.com) used crowdsourcing for
7. Accept or reject a solution. designing a successful annual Super Bowl advertis-
8. Compensate the crowd. ing campaign.
• Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) is considered by many
to be the “granddaddy” of crowdsourcing, and is
certainly the world’s largest crowdsourcing project.
For a comprehensive slide show, see Leimeister (2013).