The Mechanics of Crowdsourcing: Mobilizing the Many and the Extraordinary
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Gegenhuber, Thomas
Bauer, Robert M.
Crowdsourcing is an integral part of the digital society. Crowdsourcing still seems to carry significant novelty for scholars and practitioners alike, but, arguably, it has become a buzzword. As a result, the meaning of crowdsourcing is blurred and distorted. In our talk we reassess and clarify the concept "crowdsourcing". Furthermore, we distinguish between four types of crowdsourcing and examine the consequences of each type for (a digital) society.
 Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us here. I guess we've all had three marvelous days at Republika and we're getting towards the final so on behalf of Thomas and myself, I wish all of us an interesting and joyful session. Let's get started. What's our starting point? Our starting point is something that may sound familiar to those who saw Florian Schmidt's talk and we will go down a slightly different alley. The relationship one to all is a pretty powerful thing. You have one agent that could be an individual or an organization and this agent is capable of reaching everybody else. So for instance, our agent can, our individual or organization can broadcast a message. Everybody else will receive the message. We'll all be on the receiving end. Everybody makes their decision how they want to react to that message and then that could include getting back to the central agent, ignore it, take any action, whatever. Traditionally one to all relationships are associated with a lot of power and were thus in the center of political focus. Think of mass media, which are traditional channels for one all communication. Think of radio, TV, newspaper. It's all about one all communication and traditionally extensive use of mass media was reserved to the powerful elites. Now we all know when the internet came, it came with a promise and the promise was each and everybody of us will be capable of engaging in one to all communication. That's quite a powerful promise because it means everyone online is in principle capable of reaching everybody else online. And by now that means reaching about 80% of the developed world and about one third of the developing world. And in addition we know that the backbone of the internet, of the global internet is cell phone infrastructure and the cell phone infrastructure is by now completed. Now investment goes into upgrading cell phone infrastructure so that it can deliver broadband internet. So it will not be very long until in fact technically we're in principle in a situation where every individual on this planet is in a position that they can reach everyone else on this planet. And in fact even now the internet has delivered on many of these promises. Think of the many marvelous examples that you have seen here at Republika on how individuals or small initiatives manage to mobilize fairly big crowds for political purposes. Or another important area how many great examples have we seen of entertaining joyful material that because of the internet can now reach big crowds and reach big audiences. So in the realm of social activism, of politics, of entertainment, the one to all communication is actually has become standard. Crowd sourcing also uses the one to all communication but it raises a completely different question because in politics and in entertainment the bigger your audience the better. But crowdsourcing is not primarily about politics or entertainment. It's about solving problems. It's about executing tasks. That means now we have economic criteria to fulfill. That means you want to solve your problem with the least possible effort, with using as little resources as possible. The same is true for executing tasks. You want to execute them as efficiently as possible. That raises the question why would you want to go for a one to all communication and talk to everybody? Usually you wouldn't want to do that. You want to do to a few people that actually help you solve the task and yet there are cases in which it makes sense to address everybody and go for one to all communication. On a footnote it's often said that crowdsourcing means you outsource a task to a crowd. That's somewhat imprecise. It's imprecise because in many cases it's true that the crowd actually solves the task but there are many other cases in which the crowd is only mobilized as an intermediary step and you want to identify the one or few people to who you actually outsource the task. So to be more specific our working definition of crowdsourcing is you use broadcast search. You use logically speaking global search to connect to outsourcing partners for problem solving and task execution. Now initiatives, crowdsourcing initiatives are now in the hundreds and we're in a situation where it's getting difficult to see the forest for the trees. Our claim is that if you carefully look at how does one to all communication actually generate value for problem solving and task execution, if you carefully pursue that question you find out that underlying these hundreds of initiatives are a few basic mechanisms that help us better understand crowdsourcing. This is what we're after in this talk, reassessing and clarifying the concept and our guideline for doing this is pursuing the question how does global search actually create value. Now the idea that global search creates value has nothing to do with the internet, it's way older. So let's look at two examples that date back millennia. Chinese legends have it that in the fifth or sixth century after Christ the emperor wanted to expand his empire and thus needed a big army. So how did he assemble the big army? Which soldiers should he pick? He came up with a very simple solution. He asked every family to contribute one male because this task is so humongous, so big that selection wouldn't be efficient, he went for everyone. So everyone in his community, everyone in his target group, every family was supposed to contribute one male and it wouldn't matter if the individual contribution was excellent or mediocre, the number, the sheer volume of contributions would actually help him solve the task. Now for a different, similarly old but very different approach, another story, I'm not sure if you're a particularly religious crowd, this is baby Christ being born and those of you who know the Bible know that when baby Christ was born there were these kings or wise men, the three guys, celebrities that came to worship the baby, but they didn't know where to go, so they went to the local king and asked the local king, where should we go? We want to pay attention and honor the new king. As you can imagine the acting king wasn't amused about the idea of a new king being born and decided to get rid of the new king, yet he had no clue who to get rid of. So what he did do, one to all, so he decided get rid of every newborn, because not because he didn't like every newborn, it was just one guy that he was after, a very selective case now, but in order to get to this one, getting to everybody would be an excellent solution. So we have two very different fundamental principles. One is very big tasks, one is very selective tasks and we go deeper into these two principles now. So really let's go back to the 21st century and as Robert mentioned, the principles remain the same and we're going to investigate them more in detail how they play out today. So we distinguish between four types of value and two types associated with the selective approach, so mobilize many to find the one solution I want, another one is an aggregated approach, so mobilize many to harness all the contribution and exploit the sheer force of numbers. I will illustrate those types with some examples, you probably know some or most of the examples so I will rush through them just for illustration. So the first one is creative expertise. I'm looking for a new, a valuable contribution that requires specific skills and the knowledge for this is not inside the organization or we don't know where to find it and the more people we reach, the higher the likelihood is that we find a good solution. Most well known example, we heard it also today, is inocentive and crowdsourcing contest platform where organizations can ask the crowd to solve an innovation platform, the crowd network submits solutions and the client, the organization on this side decides who will win. In this case, inocentive is an intermediary in the middle who connects the organizations who want to solve innovation problems with the crowd. Another example from Berlin takes a little bit different approach, a more community driven and it's a fairer approach. They also do this kind of innovation contest but they separate, first the community decides who wins, so there's amount of money, a price for the community science who is winning and who is not winning and second, the client needs to pay a second time. So it's fair in the sense of the client needs to pay two times for the community price, for the community decides and for the idea the client wants to use. Another approach is critical information. Critical for information is to search for context specific personal experience and knowledge. It's difficult then, creative expertise but for critical information, you don't need domain specific training. It's more about being at the right place at the right moment. And now that's the only time I go back to history again is the one that poster is the perfect example for that. I know you're the villain because you're standing next to me and I can identify you and call the police. So that's a classical example of critical information. Another example are user to user communities like this product communities like Office 365. This is not an advertisement where big firms outsource the customer services to get I have a problem with the product. Robert knows the answer because it is a similar problem with that because of his personal experience he could answer my problem. The third type of value, so maybe a short recap. So the first one was we need to find someone who has a great idea. One was critical information we need to find someone who has a personal experience knows who the villain is. And now we turn to the other two types where it is really about we want to ask everyone, we want to use, we want to mobilize as many as possible and make use of their numbers. And here we go to the fourth type, a third type for creating value is execution capacity. So this is about the search for a large number of small contributions that add up and solve a big task. And this is a mostly task which cannot yet be solved by computers. Again well known examples, most people have filled it out, recapture where you this is the security feature on web pages, you need to type in those numbers and by typing in those numbers you help Google to improve the map services. From the public realm, you the crowd, you help those guys execution capacity, very small standardized task, help to identify moon craters, you just go there and press on the dots where there is a crater. And also crowdfunding relies on a similar principle, we search for a large number of users who are willing to donate this small amount of money, but overall if it adds up it solves a big pot of cash. The fourth type is what we call bar gaining power. So this is about a search for a large number of similar offerings to lower prices. Because crowd mobilization, if I mobilize many, this creates abundance. And if I have abundance, this can be turned to economic gains for those guys who do the crowd sourcing and the intermediaries. The examples here probably also well known, 99 design, they have this design contest and the logo platform over 40,000 templates because of all the choices, it's easy to people are willing to deliver for low prices. Another one is eLens which is technically an online freelance market where you post a job, you get many proposals because you get so many proposals, it's all transparent, it's very likely there will always be someone who offers a lower price when you post a job. And of course those four types do not always occur in the peer form, it's always overlapping. Take Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a marketplace for micro tasks where people go online and solve tasks like categorizing home pages. The execution capacity in this case, of course, we have many small tasks, we mobilize a large number of users and this is a very efficient all adds up to solving a big problem. Bar gaining power in the sense is because we mobilize so many users, the people who use Mechanical Turk are able to pay below minimum wage and very low payments because there's so many people, there's always someone else to do the job. Another example where we have combined of course is a C-click fix which is something to fix potholes and urban maintenance problems. And here's the critical information, again I need to be in Toronto on Danda Street to see that there is a pothole, put on my mobile phone, take a picture of the pothole posted on the platform so Toronto knows okay we need to fix this. So this is the critical information part. The execution capacity part on this platform is by outsourcing the maintenance work to the crowd, we have 24-7 surveillance and quality control of the streets of Toronto because the crowd is everywhere and can everywhere take pictures. It would make no sense for Toronto to do this task itself. So these are the four types which are included in any crowdsourcing platform that create value. But what are really the sources? What are the societal sources that this actually works? And we argue crowdsourcing mainly mobilized from the fringes of a global economy. So the first one which is actually from a German business book, I like this quote from Christoph Gieser and Lena Schiller-Klausen, I'm going to translate it in English, people participate in open-source and crowdsourcing activities in the free time to make up for the lack of excitement in the daily job. So one motivation is of course that people want to do interesting things, other motivations are well known like I want to learn and especially if I'm in the early stage of career is many people do crowdsourcing because they want to signal the skills, they want to build up their reputation which is essentially very important in an attention economy. Another source of value is what we like to call marginal or the effect of killing time. So you're doing for example micro tasks or small rating tasks on the subway and as Joachim Pankler perfectly noted is the less investment necessary for individuals to participate because the task is just one click, the higher the likely set of contributors. And the third source is for mobilizing the people is especially in emerging economies. So platforms and many crowdsourcing, intermediaries exploit the fact that earning small sums via micro-tasking or winning a contest just once in a while, just once in a while, even if the winning chances are so slim is still economically feasible within emerging countries. And an example that reflects that is data from Ross from 2010 where you can see the North American population on a mechanical torque decreasing at the same time India is increasing and here we have the turning point 2010. We don't have better data but we have also other anecdotal evidence that this trend is continuing. For example here we have design, 99 designs, the design competition model works especially good in Asia and the sign crowd jumps into Asia, they're going to open up subsidiaries there to mobilize the crowd in Asia and gain more clients. And because we are here at a conference and where a conference is, it always stands for what the industry, where the industry is heading and here the first crowdsourcing global week in Singapore and also next year in Singapore. So we see the crowd source, the crowd population overall the shifting towards Asia. So we have another five minutes I suppose. Where does that leave us? So we have these four types of value that is created through crowdsourcing and now we could go into much detail and look what are the specific challenges for each of these types. We don't have the time here, we did not plan on doing this. Just give me one example. But before that note that we have two different types of challenges. One is the mechanics. How does it actually work and this is pretty much about how does the information flow from one to all and back. So we have to make sure we have an uninterrupted communicative chain from one to all and back. And that's not always easy. One example, creative expertise, we say it's difficult to communicate the problems and evaluate solutions. Why would that be the case? Clearly if you have a problem that you cannot solve and you don't know how to talk to, it's difficult to describe the problem in a way that is both meaningful and doesn't narrow down the problem to where it's unsolvable because it's your limited view of the problem. So for instance when NASA tried to, when NASA outsourced, crowdsourced predicting solar activity, a problem that they hadn't been able to solve in years despite a lot of investment, they had to redefine the problem in a way that was different, was broad enough so that everybody could understand it and in fact it was a retired telecommunications engineer and not an astrophysicist that actually solved it. The same is true for evaluating the problem. If you're far from your own expertise, it's difficult to evaluate. And the more important part here is the other side. This has to do with the societal challenges. This has to do with shaping social relations and here are important challenges in crowdsourcing. Few examples. We not take all competition. Thomas mentioned that Yoboto now goes into fostering the community because we know from Innocentif that it can be quite frustrating for contributors. If you know you have at best lottery-like chances to win because only one will win out of many, many contributions. So there's a potential for frustration there and in order to make it fair and sustainable, one approach is foster the community. But there are also interesting implications about communities because think about this. Big data, big brother. We watch the streets of Toronto, we watch the streets of New York or TripAdvisor. We watch all hotels. What enormous amount of control does that make possible? No hotel company would be able to control their employees only close to what all the customers can do. So it's not only about getting more community, getting more crowd. It's also about developing crowd competence, developing codes of conduct, how a strong crowd can actually develop that added value without doing damage. Damage here, the Lynch mob, you remember maybe Boston Marathon. Some people thought they saw the perpetrator posted pictures, somebody was wrongfully accused and they almost destroyed his life. So there are interesting aspects in here including all problems, exploitation. We have seen this at the beginning of industrialization, simple tasks, very little, very low wages, exploitation. We unionized with developed crowd competence to reshift the income distribution. So it's this part that we think is the future of crowdsourcing. There are challenges here but they are relatively close to being solved. This is the interesting part and this has to do with developing more powerful crowds. And more powerful crowds are good because they can resist but also they have a life of their own. So if we go back to assembling an army, we should also keep in mind that this is the army that was assembled by the East Indian Company and the East Indian Company, the Brits had no idea about the local communities and the rules and the culture. So we're not surprised to hear that it didn't take long until the crowd turned against those who actually had recruited them. So to summarize, crowdsourcing is proliferating and multiplying and we're going to see many more variations. So it will be difficult to see the forest for the trees. However, the DNA is simple, it's four mechanisms and I think we were able to explain these basic four mechanisms. Second, where does the value actually come from? It comes from the fringes. Marginalized resources are used through crowdsourcing, are connected to the core of the economy, which has pros and cons. Finally, where is the future, the crowds are getting more political, Kickstarter is being sued for fraudulent use of crowd funds, CrowdFlower is sued for minimum wage. So there is a lot of movement there, which is important. On the other hand, we know it's not only about making crowds stronger, it's also about developing community competence to avoid big brother phenomena or lynch mobs in the digital age. I think this is where we can stop and hopefully we can take a few more questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. I think that's worth an applause. I fear our time is running up. I think we only have time for one or two questions, but was it a question? No. Do you see any questions? Oh, yeah, there. I'm going to sit down. Thank you very much. Well, then I have a question for you. It's really interesting that you mentioned in the end there could be some kind of an emancipatory potential in the crowd. So the crowd bites back. But what kind of factors, what kind of variables must be there in order for a crowd to bite back or to become resilient? That's interesting. I think there are two factors. One is crowds are getting more self-confident. They understand how much value they contribute and thus they perceive their own right to ask. The other thing is that I think intermediaries are really important and the most advanced intermediaries. And I think Kvarki and Jovoto are quite interesting examples. They actually help the crowd to emancipate because they understand if the crowd is stronger, it not only gains more value, it also contributes more value. So there's a win-win situation also in there as long as the political power and the community competence are both there. That would be my answer. Would you? It's fine. Okay. I think because of our time, thanks again for your presentation. After a short break, we'll continue with our next one. Thank you. Thank you.
 Good afternoon, everybody.  Thanks for joining us here.  I guess we've all had three marvelous days at Republika and we're getting towards the  final so on behalf of Thomas and myself, I wish all of us an interesting and joyful  session.  Let's get started.  What's our starting point?  Our starting point is something that may sound familiar to those who saw Florian Schmidt's  talk and we will go down a slightly different alley.  The relationship one to all is a pretty powerful thing.  You have one agent that could be an individual or an organization and this agent is capable  of reaching everybody else.  So for instance, our agent can, our individual or organization can broadcast a message.  Everybody else will receive the message.  We'll all be on the receiving end.  Everybody makes their decision how they want to react to that message and then that could  include getting back to the central agent, ignore it, take any action, whatever.  Traditionally one to all relationships are associated with a lot of power and were thus  in the center of political focus.  Think of mass media, which are traditional channels for one all communication.  Think of radio, TV, newspaper.  It's all about one all communication and traditionally extensive use of mass media was reserved to  the powerful elites.  Now we all know when the internet came, it came with a promise and the promise was each  and everybody of us will be capable of engaging in one to all communication.  That's quite a powerful promise because it means everyone online is in principle capable  of reaching everybody else online.  And by now that means reaching about 80% of the developed world and about one third of  the developing world.  And in addition we know that the backbone of the internet, of the global internet is  cell phone infrastructure and the cell phone infrastructure is by now completed.  Now investment goes into upgrading cell phone infrastructure so that it can deliver broadband  internet.  So it will not be very long until in fact technically we're in principle in a situation  where every individual on this planet is in a position that they can reach everyone else  on this planet.  And in fact even now the internet has delivered on many of these promises.  Think of the many marvelous examples that you have seen here at Republika on how individuals  or small initiatives manage to mobilize fairly big crowds for political purposes.  Or another important area how many great examples have we seen of entertaining joyful material  that because of the internet can now reach big crowds and reach big audiences.  So in the realm of social activism, of politics, of entertainment, the one to all communication  is actually has become standard.  Crowd sourcing also uses the one to all communication but it raises a completely different question  because in politics and in entertainment the bigger your audience the better.  But crowdsourcing is not primarily about politics or entertainment.  It's about solving problems.  It's about executing tasks.  That means now we have economic criteria to fulfill.  That means you want to solve your problem with the least possible effort, with using  as little resources as possible.  The same is true for executing tasks.  You want to execute them as efficiently as possible.  That raises the question why would you want to go for a one to all communication and talk  to everybody?  Usually you wouldn't want to do that.  You want to do to a few people that actually help you solve the task and yet there are  cases in which it makes sense to address everybody and go for one to all communication.  On a footnote it's often said that crowdsourcing means you outsource a task to a crowd.  That's somewhat imprecise.  It's imprecise because in many cases it's true that the crowd actually solves the task  but there are many other cases in which the crowd is only mobilized as an intermediary  step and you want to identify the one or few people to who you actually outsource the task.  So to be more specific our working definition of crowdsourcing is you use broadcast search.  You use logically speaking global search to connect to outsourcing partners for problem  solving and task execution.  Now initiatives, crowdsourcing initiatives are now in the hundreds and we're in a situation  where it's getting difficult to see the forest for the trees.  Our claim is that if you carefully look at how does one to all communication actually  generate value for problem solving and task execution, if you carefully pursue that question  you find out that underlying these hundreds of initiatives are a few basic mechanisms  that help us better understand crowdsourcing.  This is what we're after in this talk, reassessing and clarifying the concept and our guideline  for doing this is pursuing the question how does global search actually create value.  Now the idea that global search creates value has nothing to do with the internet, it's  way older.  So let's look at two examples that date back millennia.  Chinese legends have it that in the fifth or sixth century after Christ the emperor  wanted to expand his empire and thus needed a big army.  So how did he assemble the big army?  Which soldiers should he pick?  He came up with a very simple solution.  He asked every family to contribute one male because this task is so humongous, so big  that selection wouldn't be efficient, he went for everyone.  So everyone in his community, everyone in his target group, every family was supposed  to contribute one male and it wouldn't matter if the individual contribution was excellent  or mediocre, the number, the sheer volume of contributions would actually help him solve  the task.  Now for a different, similarly old but very different approach, another story, I'm not  sure if you're a particularly religious crowd, this is baby Christ being born and those of  you who know the Bible know that when baby Christ was born there were these kings or  wise men, the three guys, celebrities that came to worship the baby, but they didn't  know where to go, so they went to the local king and asked the local king, where should  we go?  We want to pay attention and honor the new king.  As you can imagine the acting king wasn't amused about the idea of a new king being born and  decided to get rid of the new king, yet he had no clue who to get rid of.  So what he did do, one to all, so he decided get rid of every newborn, because not because  he didn't like every newborn, it was just one guy that he was after, a very selective  case now, but in order to get to this one, getting to everybody would be an excellent  solution.  So we have two very different fundamental principles.  One is very big tasks, one is very selective tasks and we go deeper into these two principles  now.  So really let's go back to the 21st century and as Robert mentioned, the principles remain  the same and we're going to investigate them more in detail how they play out today.  So we distinguish between four types of value and two types associated with the selective  approach, so mobilize many to find the one solution I want, another one is an aggregated  approach, so mobilize many to harness all the contribution and exploit the sheer force  of numbers.  I will illustrate those types with some examples, you probably know some or most of the examples  so I will rush through them just for illustration.  So the first one is creative expertise.  I'm looking for a new, a valuable contribution that requires specific skills and the knowledge  for this is not inside the organization or we don't know where to find it and the more  people we reach, the higher the likelihood is that we find a good solution.  Most well known example, we heard it also today, is inocentive and crowdsourcing contest  platform where organizations can ask the crowd to solve an innovation platform, the crowd  network submits solutions and the client, the organization on this side decides who  will win.  In this case, inocentive is an intermediary in the middle who connects the organizations  who want to solve innovation problems with the crowd.  Another example from Berlin takes a little bit different approach, a more community driven  and it's a fairer approach.  They also do this kind of innovation contest but they separate, first the community decides  who wins, so there's amount of money, a price for the community science who is winning and  who is not winning and second, the client needs to pay a second time.  So it's fair in the sense of the client needs to pay two times for the community price,  for the community decides and for the idea the client wants to use.  Another approach is critical information.  Critical for information is to search for context specific personal experience and knowledge.  It's difficult then, creative expertise but for critical information, you don't need domain  specific training.  It's more about being at the right place at the right moment.  And now that's the only time I go back to history again is the one that poster is the  perfect example for that.  I know you're the villain because you're standing next to me and I can identify you and call  the police.  So that's a classical example of critical information.  Another example are user to user communities like this product communities like Office  365.  This is not an advertisement where big firms outsource the customer services to get I have  a problem with the product.  Robert knows the answer because it is a similar problem with that because of his personal  experience he could answer my problem.  The third type of value, so maybe a short recap.  So the first one was we need to find someone who has a great idea.  One was critical information we need to find someone who has a personal experience knows  who the villain is.  And now we turn to the other two types where it is really about we want to ask everyone,  we want to use, we want to mobilize as many as possible and make use of their numbers.  And here we go to the fourth type, a third type for creating value is execution capacity.  So this is about the search for a large number of small contributions that add up and solve  a big task.  And this is a mostly task which cannot yet be solved by computers.  Again well known examples, most people have filled it out, recapture where you this is  the security feature on web pages, you need to type in those numbers and by typing in  those numbers you help Google to improve the map services.  From the public realm, you the crowd, you help those guys execution capacity, very small  standardized task, help to identify moon craters, you just go there and press on the dots where  there is a crater.  And also crowdfunding relies on a similar principle, we search for a large number of  users who are willing to donate this small amount of money, but overall if it adds up  it solves a big pot of cash.  The fourth type is what we call bar gaining power.  So this is about a search for a large number of similar offerings to lower prices.  Because crowd mobilization, if I mobilize many, this creates abundance.  And if I have abundance, this can be turned to economic gains for those guys who do the  crowd sourcing and the intermediaries.  The examples here probably also well known, 99 design, they have this design contest and  the logo platform over 40,000 templates because of all the choices, it's easy to people are  willing to deliver for low prices.  Another one is eLens which is technically an online freelance market where you post  a job, you get many proposals because you get so many proposals, it's all transparent,  it's very likely there will always be someone who offers a lower price when you post a job.  And of course those four types do not always occur in the peer form, it's always overlapping.  Take Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a marketplace for micro tasks where people go online and  solve tasks like categorizing home pages.  The execution capacity in this case, of course, we have many small tasks, we mobilize a large  number of users and this is a very efficient all adds up to solving a big problem.  Bar gaining power in the sense is because we mobilize so many users, the people who  use Mechanical Turk are able to pay below minimum wage and very low payments because  there's so many people, there's always someone else to do the job.  Another example where we have combined of course is a C-click fix which is something  to fix potholes and urban maintenance problems.  And here's the critical information, again I need to be in Toronto on Danda Street to  see that there is a pothole, put on my mobile phone, take a picture of the pothole posted  on the platform so Toronto knows okay we need to fix this.  So this is the critical information part.  The execution capacity part on this platform is by outsourcing the maintenance work to  the crowd, we have 24-7 surveillance and quality control of the streets of Toronto because  the crowd is everywhere and can everywhere take pictures.  It would make no sense for Toronto to do this task itself.  So these are the four types which are included in any crowdsourcing platform that create  value.  But what are really the sources?  What are the societal sources that this actually works?  And we argue crowdsourcing mainly mobilized from the fringes of a global economy.  So the first one which is actually from a German business book, I like this quote from  Christoph Gieser and Lena Schiller-Klausen, I'm going to translate it in English, people  participate in open-source and crowdsourcing activities in the free time to make up for  the lack of excitement in the daily job.  So one motivation is of course that people want to do interesting things, other motivations  are well known like I want to learn and especially if I'm in the early stage of career is many  people do crowdsourcing because they want to signal the skills, they want to build up  their reputation which is essentially very important in an attention economy.  Another source of value is what we like to call marginal or the effect of killing time.  So you're doing for example micro tasks or small rating tasks on the subway and as Joachim  Pankler perfectly noted is the less investment necessary for individuals to participate because  the task is just one click, the higher the likely set of contributors.  And the third source is for mobilizing the people is especially in emerging economies.  So platforms and many crowdsourcing, intermediaries exploit the fact that earning small sums via  micro-tasking or winning a contest just once in a while, just once in a while, even if  the winning chances are so slim is still economically feasible within emerging countries.  And an example that reflects that is data from Ross from 2010 where you can see the North  American population on a mechanical torque decreasing at the same time India is increasing  and here we have the turning point 2010.  We don't have better data but we have also other anecdotal evidence that this trend is  continuing.  For example here we have design, 99 designs, the design competition model works especially  good in Asia and the sign crowd jumps into Asia, they're going to open up subsidiaries  there to mobilize the crowd in Asia and gain more clients.  And because we are here at a conference and where a conference is, it always stands for  what the industry, where the industry is heading and here the first crowdsourcing global week  in Singapore and also next year in Singapore.  So we see the crowd source, the crowd population overall the shifting towards Asia.  So we have another five minutes I suppose.  Where does that leave us?  So we have these four types of value that is created through crowdsourcing and now we  could go into much detail and look what are the specific challenges for each of these  types.  We don't have the time here, we did not plan on doing this.  Just give me one example.  But before that note that we have two different types of challenges.  One is the mechanics.  How does it actually work and this is pretty much about how does the information flow from  one to all and back.  So we have to make sure we have an uninterrupted communicative chain from one to all and back.  And that's not always easy.  One example, creative expertise, we say it's difficult to communicate the problems and  evaluate solutions.  Why would that be the case?  Clearly if you have a problem that you cannot solve and you don't know how to talk to, it's  difficult to describe the problem in a way that is both meaningful and doesn't narrow  down the problem to where it's unsolvable because it's your limited view of the problem.  So for instance when NASA tried to, when NASA outsourced, crowdsourced predicting solar  activity, a problem that they hadn't been able to solve in years despite a lot of investment,  they had to redefine the problem in a way that was different, was broad enough so that  everybody could understand it and in fact it was a retired telecommunications engineer  and not an astrophysicist that actually solved it.  The same is true for evaluating the problem.  If you're far from your own expertise, it's difficult to evaluate.  And the more important part here is the other side.  This has to do with the societal challenges.  This has to do with shaping social relations and here are important challenges in crowdsourcing.  Few examples.  We not take all competition.  Thomas mentioned that Yoboto now goes into fostering the community because we know from  Innocentif that it can be quite frustrating for contributors.  If you know you have at best lottery-like chances to win because only one will win out  of many, many contributions.  So there's a potential for frustration there and in order to make it fair and sustainable,  one approach is foster the community.  But there are also interesting implications about communities because think about this.  Big data, big brother.  We watch the streets of Toronto, we watch the streets of New York or TripAdvisor.  We watch all hotels.  What enormous amount of control does that make possible?  No hotel company would be able to control their employees only close to what all the  customers can do.  So it's not only about getting more community, getting more crowd.  It's also about developing crowd competence, developing codes of conduct, how a strong  crowd can actually develop that added value without doing damage.  Damage here, the Lynch mob, you remember maybe Boston Marathon.  Some people thought they saw the perpetrator posted pictures, somebody was wrongfully accused  and they almost destroyed his life.  So there are interesting aspects in here including all problems, exploitation.  We have seen this at the beginning of industrialization, simple tasks, very little, very low wages,  exploitation.  We unionized with developed crowd competence to reshift the income distribution.  So it's this part that we think is the future of crowdsourcing.  There are challenges here but they are relatively close to being solved.  This is the interesting part and this has to do with developing more powerful crowds.  And more powerful crowds are good because they can resist but also they have a life  of their own.  So if we go back to assembling an army, we should also keep in mind that this is the  army that was assembled by the East Indian Company and the East Indian Company, the Brits  had no idea about the local communities and the rules and the culture.  So we're not surprised to hear that it didn't take long until the crowd turned against those  who actually had recruited them.  So to summarize, crowdsourcing is proliferating and multiplying and we're going to see many  more variations.  So it will be difficult to see the forest for the trees.  However, the DNA is simple, it's four mechanisms and I think we were able to explain these  basic four mechanisms.  Second, where does the value actually come from?  It comes from the fringes.  Marginalized resources are used through crowdsourcing, are connected to the core of the economy,  which has pros and cons.  Finally, where is the future, the crowds are getting more political, Kickstarter is being  sued for fraudulent use of crowd funds, CrowdFlower is sued for minimum wage.  So there is a lot of movement there, which is important.  On the other hand, we know it's not only about making crowds stronger, it's also about developing  community competence to avoid big brother phenomena or lynch mobs in the digital age.  I think this is where we can stop and hopefully we can take a few more questions.  Thank you very much for the presentation.  I think that's worth an applause.  I fear our time is running up.  I think we only have time for one or two questions, but was it a question?  No.  Do you see any questions?  Oh, yeah, there.  I'm going to sit down.  Thank you very much.  Well, then I have a question for you.  It's really interesting that you mentioned in the end there could be some kind of an  emancipatory potential in the crowd.  So the crowd bites back.  But what kind of factors, what kind of variables must be there in order for a crowd to bite  back or to become resilient?  That's interesting.  I think there are two factors.  One is crowds are getting more self-confident.  They understand how much value they contribute and thus they perceive their own right to  ask.  The other thing is that I think intermediaries are really important and the most advanced  intermediaries.  And I think Kvarki and Jovoto are quite interesting examples.  They actually help the crowd to emancipate because they understand if the crowd is stronger,  it not only gains more value, it also contributes more value.  So there's a win-win situation also in there as long as the political power and the community  competence are both there.  That would be my answer.  Would you?  It's fine.  Okay.  I think because of our time, thanks again for your presentation.  After a short break, we'll continue with our next one.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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