Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds for Good
How
non-profit crowdsourcing could provide a competitive advantage for
solving a tough global problem.
Non-profit
status used to be a tax designation whose value derived primarily
from allowing an entity to offer tax-shielding receipts for
donations. But in the online world, where companies can easily
leverage armies of globally-dispersed workers to carry out small
tasks in pursuit of a larger goal, non-profit status can become
something greater: a source of competitive advantage.
The
Curious Case of Wikipedia
Jimmy
Wales and Larry Sanger initially launched Nupedia, an online
encyclopedia written by experts, in 2000. Nupedia used a thorough
peer-review editorial process designed to produce articles of a
quality comparable to professional encyclopedias. By limiting the
user base to only a select few experts and imposing upon them an
extensive seven-step process, Nupedia was slow to grow.
Shortly
after, Wales and Sanger were introduced to the concept of a wiki - a
repository of information written, edited, and run by its users. The
two decided to create Wikipedia in 2001 as a feeder to Nupedia.
Both were online web platforms, but whereas Nupedia was bureaucratic and run by an oligarchic community of the select few, Wikipedia was nimble, open, and democratic. Nupedia maintained traditional, old school ways of leveraging manpower. Wikipedia, by contrast, opened itself up and channelled the power of a much larger crowd in a rapid and efficient way.
The
results were telling. Nupedia only posted 21 articles at the end of
its first year; Wikipedia managed 200,000 in that same time period.
Moreover,
the risk of the wiki approach - that of increased output coming at
the expense of quality - turned out to be overstated. While some
high-profile mistakes and vandalised articles grabbed headlines, a
2005 study by Nature, the weekly science journal, found Wikipedia to
be as
accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.
An
Army of Free Workers
Unsurprisingly,
as Wikipedia has grown, its competitors have disappeared. Microsoft
Encarta was discontinued in 2009. And after 244 years of producing
the iconic volumes seen on shelves around the world, Encyclopaedia
Britannica announced in 2012 that it was discontinuing its print
edition. How do you sell something for hundreds when everyone has
access to a competing product of similar quality that’s larger and
totally free?
It’s
worth delving into the fascinating dynamics of Wikipedia’s business
model. Wikipedia is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit
organisation. It’s highly unlikely that those volunteers would have
dedicated millions of hours to writing and editing articles if they
believed that instead of contributing to the utopian idea of a free
encyclopedia for all, they were instead subsidising Wikipedia’s
shareholders with free work en route to an eventual revenue model of
selling ads or subscription fees.
User-generated
content can make corporations rich, as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
and others have shown, but posting selfies is more fun than editing
encyclopedia articles. Wikipedia needed and found dedicated
volunteers who were willing to contribute hours doing pro bono work
that people used to be paid real money to carry out.
Expanding
this Quest with the LearnCloud
The
lesson leads to another question: how can we further use the crowd to
promote good around the world? We think that by applying a similar
approach we can build an online movement to revolutionise access to
education around the world.
Like
most people who are used to being online almost 24/7, the authors and
readers of this article likely don’t think twice about looking
things up on the internet whenever and wherever. Need to convert
Celsius to Fahrenheit? There’s an app for that. Need to learn
trigonometry? You can watch videos on Khan Academy.
But
for too many children that’s not an option because they live in
places where they can’t go online. These kids are usually the ones
who would have the most to gain from access to this free content, but
even if they had a suitable device and found an internet connection
once a month, they wouldn’t know where to start. Where is the free
content? Will it work on their mobile device? Can it be downloaded
and used later on, when they’re offline?
To
fill this need, Rumie, an organisation dedicated to delivering free
digital education to the world’s underprivileged children, created
the LearnCloud,
which can be described as Pinterest for Free Educational Content.
Just as Wikipedia leveraged the wisdom of crowds to produce the
world’s largest free encyclopedia, the LearnCloud harnesses the
world’s collective brainpower to find the best free educational
content that will work straight out of the box without an Internet
connection. No online registration. No downloading new chapters. No
in-app purchases. It’s all free and works offline.
All
of this information is accessible to anyone with a smartphone or
tablet - whether one of Rumie’s own (now in six countries and
expanding fast) or any other Android device (now spreading across
emerging markets and expected to pass three billion worldwide by
2016). Need a free encyclopedia? It’s available. (Wikipedia, of
course.) Webster’s Dictionary? It’s there. Word Games? Math
Games? Textbooks? Instructional videos?
Naturally,
sorting through everything available online and ferreting out the
best free, mobile-friendly and offline-usable content would be a task
that would take thousands and thousands of paid employees - a very
expensive proposition.
But
as we’ve seen already, in the Internet era a creative non-profit
with a cool web platform and a utopian mission can often find a
cheaper way to get things done.
Read
more at
http://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/harnessing-the-wisdom-of-crowds-for-good-3713#mf1SRVVR3Ebhjdjz.99
No comments:
Post a Comment