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I was quoted today in a story in Indian daily The Hindu, in a story on crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is an concept that has gained much currency over the last two or three years. It essentially refers to the idea that many people, distributed across time and space, outside the organization, can often perform a task more efficiently than a few people, inside an organization, thanks to the low transaction cost of search and aggregation, enabled by the internet.

The related concept of the wisdom of crowds refers to the idea that many non-experts can take better decisions than a few experts, given the right tools and conditions.

Jeff Howe’s ‘Crowdsourcing‘ and James Surowiecki’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ are the two must-read books on this topic.

Here is the full text of the story –

The magic of many

Sruthi Krishnan

Crowdsourcing — letting others do it

CHENNAI: “Those in Mumbai, slums @ Geeta Nagar destroyed in rains, help with rice/atta/tea/pulses/clothes.”  Read More

James Surowiecki argues in The New Yorker that the dichotomy of higher popularity and lower profits in the newspaper industry can’t continue indefinitely –

The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. People don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it…

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress points to Felix Salmon’s post in Portfolio and agrees that “the problem newspapers are having with online isn’t that the readers won’t pay, it’s that the advertisers won’t pay” –  Read More

In 2004, James Surowiecki wrote his brilliant book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations and argued that a diverse collection (crowd) of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts.

Specifically, he says that the wisdom of crowds is great at solving three types of problems — cognition problems which involve identifying a correct definitive answer, coordination problems which involve synchronizing our individual activities with others, and cooperation problems which involve acting together despite our self-interest.

However, for the wisdom of crowds to work, four basic conditions need to be met — diversity of opinion to bring in different information, independence of members from one another to avoid the herd mentality, decentralization so that people’s errors balance each other out, and a good method for aggregating opinions to distill the wisdom from the crowds.

Therefore, the wisdom of crowds fails when groups are too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative or too emotional.  Read More