Crowdsourcing, Homework for 10/27

I mentioned Crowdsourcing in Tuesday's class and suggested that it represents a very fundamental change - and a creative one - in the ways business is changing across a WIDE range of industries from the sciences to social sectors, just as we're reading in A Whole New Mind how the rise of the right brain is doing the same. Something this big demands more space in your brain, so for Tuesday please read this 4-page article from Wired Magazine's June 2006 issue on Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. Answer the questions below and email them to me in a Word (or similar) doc.

~mrc

• Explain crowdsourcing in your own words.
• What role has the internet and web technology played in the rise of crowdsourcing? Could the businesses cited in the article (iStockPhoto, Threadless, Innocentive, et al) exist without the web? How are businesses reacting to the crowdsourcing phenomenon?
• In the section on TV 2.0, the article asks "Can the crowd produce enough content to support an array of shows over many years?" Which of the shows mentioned are still on the air and which, if any, have you seen? Is that significant?
• According "The Tinkerer" page of the article, how many "solvers" (as of the article's publication date) are part of the network of scientists on InnoCentive? What is the appeal of a service like this for both corporate and individual participants? Why does each party come to the table? What do they get out of participation?
• According to MIT's Karim Lakhani, why does InnoCentive work?
• How is crowdsourcing different from outsourcing?
• What is Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
• What could you, your business, or your employer crowdsource?
• What could the government crowdsource?
• What's the relationship between what you've read in A Whole New Mind and the crowdsourcing trend?