My scribble

So, when was the last time you rejected a person’s advice judging her by her average intelligence? Or you thought you might not be heard just because you don’t fall in the intellectual category?

Well, times are changing are changing sure enough.

Arab populace thinks they deserve to be heard, suddenly there is something called as ‘media’ in China, Iranian public wants democracy, British youth want jobs, India thinks it can get rid of corruption –is this all because of internet & the accentuated freedom it has brought along? A common person yearns to be heard, she’s just coming out more aggressively than ever before.

Not all but let’s be honest – had it not been for internet (which has so far managed to stay ‘open’), we’d have been a much worse world.

Crowdsourcing is something that I believe will change our lives (like a lot of other things related to WWW that already have!)

• Democratic journalism:

Twitter, the leader of Crowdsourced journalism has literally put traditional media biggies like NYT, WaPo out of business. On the other hand, the smarter newspaper media house like HuffPo has survived, wanna know why? Again, the answer is Crowdsourcing. Community journalism (As opined here) is the way to go & my favorite tech news source Techmeme.com is doing exactly that. Modern media is more open, more engaging, more accommodating & decentralized.

It might help places like India more where journalism is sold out to a few rich & is misguiding more often than not.

• Distributed innovation & knowledge collaboration:

Wikipedia, Linux, OpenStreetMap, freelancer are amazing examples of people coming together to create a fabulous product/service with collective knowledge.

Hard to notice but for years, Google search was purely based on number of incoming links & page-clicks, another instance of Crowdsourcing. Even today, page visits & referrals constitute a major part of a page’s rank/popularity on all of the search engines.

• Governance & protection:

Iceland has become the first nation to have crowdsourced its constitution while Microsoft has taken the lead in companies having joined pre-emptive patent protection program. There’s a lot more to come as governments/authorities/organizations across the world look to cut down on spending as well as to become more transparent.

From an industry perspective, Crowdsourcing is a great pie to eat. Organizations would love to have people working for them without having to pay.

However, there are challenges too –>

• How to disseminate & utilize the information available without getting overwhelmed?

Quora’s anticipated PeopleRank Algorithm is a great example in this case. There’s a lot on how to garner the best piece of information with minimal noise.

• Is crowd always intelligent?

No. But then, some of them must be. Wisdom of the crowd almost always works. Users’ participation in decision making will give them a sense of satisfaction & freedom, another plus!

Future beholds what none of us has seen but then, You & I now have the power of shaping it! 🙂