Crowdsourcing is a topic that has gained popularity in the last few years with companies such as InnoCentive, CrowdSpring and Amazon Mechanical Turk providing platforms for companies to engage with community members to provide innovative solutions which is why I have decided that crowdsourcing will be my topic for “My half time pep talk for 2009“.
Crowdsourcing as defined by Jeff Howe is
“the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call”.
If a company needs a product designed they would define the requirements and have an open call for solutions. The best solution is selected with the winner usually receiving a reward, which is often in the form of financial compensation.
It is important to note that for a particular crowdsourcing project multiple submissions are received and the best one chosen with the rest being tossed aside. Are those that submit solutions that are being tossed aside being exploited? They get nothing in return. For the company partaking in a crowdsourcing initiative they get the to select the best and only pay for what they want or deem reputable. A key factor for these platforms to succeed is to continually grow their community base and encourage those that are not successful to try again in other crowdsourcing projects. One of these platforms, TopCoder, has implemented a model that has benefits for both those that win and those that do not.
Developing software often requires hiring software developers to develop software in order to achieve business goals. Software projects are infamous for late delivery and high costs. A company rectifying this impression on the software industry is TopCoder.
TopCoder is a software development house for outsourced projects. What separates TopCoder from its competitors is that the work is crowdsourced to a community of over 180 000 members from over 200 countries in a competition format.
Once a client approaches TopCoder a formal software methodology is used. TopCoder together with the client gathers the requirements. The project is then broken up into modules. TopCoder then evaluates if these modules exist in their module catalogue from previous competitions. If so, there is no need to develop the software again. The community of software developers are then requested to design and develop each module in a competition format. Each module has a set time period that it has to be completed within and the best solution wins a financial prize. The community then assembles the modules into the final project. There are also bug races during the testing phase that is crowdsourced to the community.
The software components developed by the community (in the component catalogue) are licensed with members who developed them earning royalties from the sales. Developers are given feedback from a review board for every submission. TopCoder provides this in the form of detailed ratings and performance metrics are kept to track a developers standing within the community and includes skill ratings and history of submissions. TopCoder also acts as a recruitment centre where companies can find the best software developers from around the world. This week Facebook announced that they were becoming a TopCoder sponsor. The metrics provided by TopCoder acts as a performance measure as to where strengths and weaknesses of the developers are.
It is key for these companies who provide crowdsourcing platforms to continually grow its community base. The challenge is keeping those who try and do not succeed satisfied so that they come back. The benefits to people who partake in TopCoder projects can be classified in two categories; Direct and Indirect.
Direct benefits include:
- Financial compensation for winners
- Financial compensation for members who do not win but do place highly
Indirect benefits include:
- Members get to see how winners solved a problem and therefore pick up new techniques
- Components allow community members to work on parts of a project where they want to and where their areas of expertise can be utilised
- Feedback is given whereby developers are told where they need to improve
- Peer recognition is provided via developer ratings which are publicly available
Indirect benefits provide members with a view that their time spent on these projects is an investment that could yield future rewards. The TopCoder platform provides members with a chance to show their capabilities and provides a platform to self-market one. This provides an opportunity for companies to see whom they can employ. TopCoder provides feedback on the quality of their work and shows members that people are using their contribution, which spurs participants to pursue perfection.
In the case of TopCoder the company provides more than just benefits to those that win. They have managed to cater for the entire community. In order for these crowdsourcing platforms to succeed their community members will have to have a reason to continually comeback to partake in crowdsourcing initiatives. Financial compensation to a minority will not be enough and indirect benefits have to be provided.
Related Posts
5 Responses to “Crowdsourcing Example – People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms”
The emergence of niche based crowdsourcing platforms and their integration with a social networking structure is one of the most exciting developments that I have observed.
The innovations that don’t ‘win’ but and be used to build other solutions or can be better fit elsewhere shouldn’t be cast aside.
This one of the Toyota principles of Lean Development.
Interesting and thought provoking post
Ed
[...] 2009. Take the time to read and comment on a collection of exceptional articles: Saadick Dhansay on Crowdsourcing, Alex Vermeule on Technology, Personal and Business innovation, Mike Brown on underground [...]
[...] complete a project is that they forget to provide a rewards system. In a previous blog post “People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms” I highlighted direct and indirect benefits of crowdsourcing for the community that are [...]
[...] research on rewards and recognition, I found some great posts by Open Technologist. In one post, Crowdsourcing Example – People Participation In Crowdsourcing Platforms, they got into an interesting topic. Rewards do have to be direct; they can also also be [...]
[...] A platform with a community of over 247, 000 members. TopCoder posts computer programming problems from organizations in the form of competitions. The community are then asked to design, develop and test the software developed in the competitions. More information can be found here. [...]