� It is quite commonly recognized that crowdsourcing as a term appeared in 2006 and readily became a key concept, a trend even, out of an occasional word. Usually it stands for a bunch of people doing something and correlating remotely in the name of idea, token fee or other little nice incentives. Hardly had crowdsourcing grew into a term, it immediately gained a load of branches, specializations and sub-ideas and started spreading and wandering around the world. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need The virtues of crowdsourcing lie in gathering any amount of people of any age, gender, confession and experience from all over the globe for completing required task. Thus selection of participants relatively grows comparing to customary outsourcing and skyrockets comparing to a company staff. Such solutions at most are notably cheaper for employers. Some companies crowdsource market researches and ideas and get pre-orders by that. For example, Chicago T-shirt Threadless designs the T-shirts only by inviting online tenders. Weekly tender brings $2 thousand and substantial vanity tickling to the winners as their designs are to be embodied. Quirkly is a community of industrial designers interrupting each other to offer various solutions to make everyday life joyful and easy. The project is based on voting to decide the most interesting goods to produce and correct defects. The method works really well, or even perfectly for the things like polls or social researches. It easily helps infrastructure development, road level improvement, getting exhaustive information on important issues, and making a detailed map and a pile of other useful doings. For instance, WeatherSignal App (currently available only for Android) gathers data on temperature, magnetism, lighting, humidity, and pressure from smartphone-owners (of course, it makes point only with the application installed) and generate a weather condition information. Above all it makes personal reports, which can be used in case of emergency. Witology, the Russian project, managed to commercialize crowds by offering companies and corporations the solution as a service. Some rumors even say that this article’s author became an early follower and turned out to participate in some polls. Well, evidently the most old-school and ubiquitous crowdsourcing project is Wikipedia. There also are several exhaustive online open dictionaries. This type of organization allowed them to cover as much information as possible. Some say, that even Facebook crowdsourced its translations into various languages in order to get a clear cultural worldview. � There also are fully humanist idealistic projects using the crowd for people’s prosperity. The Washington University scientists made a 3-d Foldit puzzle, a fusion of crowdsourcing and gamification. All the fun here is powered by protein structure modeling based on real biological laws. The developers claim that everyone can play with protein, even though he doesn’t have a foggiest idea about molecules or biology, to say nothing of micro. David Baker, an originator, is convinced that a human can use his intuition and illogical ingenuity is able to find the configurations within less time than computer. OpenSource founder, for instance, believes creating something principally new to be the main feature of humankind. We can Google information, but we can’t Google the solutions haven’t been thought of yet. So unconscious collective is the best way to tackle the task. In 2011 the Foldit gamers turned out to help determining monkey immunodeficiency virus’ crystal structure in ten days. However, silver-headed scientists had spent 15 years without reaching the desired outcome. In January, 2012 Scientific American announced the results of first crowdsourced project on structure changing of protein-catalyzer in Diels-Alder reaction. The new structure ended up being over 18 times more active. As for science-based world exploring projects, there also are eBird (collecting the resources of amateur ornithologists) and NASA Clickworkers for enthusiastic astronomers to analyze the images of Mars surface. Recently the collective mind has started being implemented in forecasting as a giant mind of a composite human. Want to have something working? Do it by yourself Of course, crowdsourcing deeply moved the society as a new cure-all, but, you know, there are hidden dangers everywhere. First of all, surprisingly, crowdsourcing quite resembles army: if an order can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood. That is why friendly crowds often implement their abilities in a wrong way, which in its turn makes everything useless. Crowdsourcing is hard to timeframe which is crucial sometimes. As we all remember, time is money, so the losses might turn out to be more notable than possible gains. Crowdsourcing is not meant for long term cooperation as it simply can’t be a permanent solution for problem solving. An entrepreneur has to continually keep up the crowd‘s interest to the project and always be in search of various nonfinancial incentives especially when curiosity and vanity tickling are not enough. The very idea of crowdsourcing doesn’t work for new professionals developing and training. It actually suggests that some people are to do something somehow somewhere sometime. Accepting solutions only from the interested and not from paid professionals usually involves certain quality losses. Crowdsourcing, however, can even lower general level of professionalism. Sometimes it even ruins the projects. Kraft the food company, for instance, after crowdsourcing the name for Vegemite successor in Australia (oh, Vegemite, a kind of Marmite and a taste of sadness, according to Amanda Palmer) got only iSnack which failed to satisfy anyone. However, here antiprofessionalism might have been successfully combined with the product itself, which you evidently either love or hate. Anyway, smart crowd forming always requires the presence of invisible hand of the employer for mobs not take the wrong turn. When uncontrolled Reddit was trying to find Boston Marathon terrorists, it ended up with a scandal, witch hunt and total intolerance. Crowdsourcing is definitely to become a considerable part of our future even though it doesn’t turn everything we know upside down. All we have to do is relax and take previous lessons into consideration. Three pillars of crowdsourcing are control, professional level of crowd and involvement into result. Even schoolchildren have already managed to gather communities and translate new Harry Potter books into their languages in several days. Undoubtedly more respectable DARPA is ready to invest $3.5 million into TechShop within its new Adaptive Vehicle Make project expecting the bright future and creating a so-called factory of quick design and reconfiguration of production capacities for supporting the wide range of military equipment turnout. So, that’s how it is so far.
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