“Dirt cheap labour – How businesses are getting the public to work for them for free.” That’s the headline that Maclean’s magazine went with this week which sells short the breadth of its story about crowdsourcing. As the article goes on to report most crowdsourcing offers incentives and awards to those who participate and contribute answers including the million-dollar Netflix prize.

For sure there are examples of crowd contribution for free – Wikipedia for one – but cheap labour is not the point of crowdsourcing. The point is that better outcomes come from a bigger pool of minds and perspectives. It’s like Sun Microsystems Cofounder says in this overused but still relevant quote: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

The real value of crowdsourcing is that it takes down all the barriers of where you work, where you live, who you know, and gives everyone the means to make enterprises and every organization smarter and work better. Crowdsourcing technology and widely accessible Internet access let anyone contribute ideas, decisions and solutions that will shape what we buy, how meaningful and accountable our government is, how interesting and relevant what we read and watch on TV will be… on and on.

Thanks to Stephanie Findlay for the story. There’s a lot more to crowdsourcing than corporate greed and we welcome Maclean’s to explore the topic further – likely Maclean’s readers would value the insight.