It’s been noted that over 2009, Wikipedia lost over 49,000 editors. According to a study by Felipe Ortega, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, the year prior saw a loss of only 4,900 editors. What does this mean? Are people losing interest in Wikipedia, one of the top 10 website in the world? Considering most students can no longer write a paper without citing Wikipedia, should we be alarmed? What if Wikipedia dies?

Wikipedia says it is nowhere near this. They point out that Mr. Ortega raises valid challenges for Wikipedia in the future, but his numbers are off. Details aside, how many editors does Wikipedia need at this point?

Back in 2001, Wikipedia needed content, but that was years ago. Now, everything you can think of has an entry. Is it possible that we simply don’t need as many editors any more? Perhaps the time has come for experts on different subjects to review and improve the content that is already there.

Whether there is a decline in editors, or the numbers are holding steady, we don’t see this as a negative sign for Wikipedia, we just think of it as an evolution. At almost ten years old, it is a great example of the wisdom of crowds and how that collective intelligence can be used. It will be interesting to see how the next few years unfold for Wikipedia.

After reading “The Scary Economics of Crowdsourcing” posted by Phil Wainewright over at eBizQ, I’ve been thinking about why people are so concerned at the prospect of crowdsourcing. Do they think it is so powerful that crowdsourcing will be the only way of work in the future or is this just sensationalized journalism?

Here at Chaordix, we always talk about crowdsourcing in a positive way – enabling faster innovation, deeper brand engagement, community development – but we see what people worry about as well. We understand the fear, but disagree with some of the logic. Here are some arguments on crowdsourcing discussions gone awry:

1. Crowdsourcing will get all of your work done for free. There is no way to trick the time/money graph. Whether you are Netflix with a million dollars kicking around, or a small startup without the cash to hire someone to design a logo for you, the graph still applies. The rumor that you’ll get a massive crowd to complete all of your work for your business, for free is not true. For example, The Guardian was able to quickly get through massive amounts of data by asking its readers to go through documents, but without having some type of incentive, people were not willing to invest very much time into it. After the initial push, it stalled.
2. Crowdsourcing will destroy corporate structure. While crowdsourcing can help find new solutions in unexpected places, it won’t be the end of business as we know it. Crowdsourcing gives mangers and executives access to more data, people and options than before, but all companies still need people to bring it all together. What we learned from our original crowdsourcing community, IdeaWarz, is that you cannot crowdsource a founding team. Experienced leaders are still key to any successful endeavor. A successful leader will recognize that they might not have all of the answers, but the experience to find and implement them.
3. Crowdsourcing is threatening my job. Unlikely, if you are good at what you do. Crowdsourcing is the democratization of talent. Yes, the new kid fresh out of school can make a logo or write a few lines of code for way cheaper than you, but this frees you up to do more involved, more complex work. Think about the attending/resident relationship of doctors. There will never be a world where we don’t need people with experience to guide people just learning. Instead of thinking about crowdsourcing as some young, inexperienced punks taking your job, why not look at crowdsourcing as a way to promote your experience – either through being a mentor to fresh ideas without experience, or as the “expert” who helps guide the decision making process?

Implementing crowdsourcing isn’t a magical solution for everything – it requires a combination of easy to use technology and thorough planning. As with any other business initiative, it has to be a good fit for the end goal. While we believe it represents an exciting opportunity for new innovation and open conversations, we don’t believe all the hype – just the facts.

Photo by kiki99

The NY Times Op-Chart for the past 10 years has singled out crowd-source as the verb of 2009, following Google as the verb of 2005 and download in 2002.

Take a look - bottom right corner…

Six years ago crowdsourcing was being sited as a trend, so the breakthrough to verb status marks a tipping point for us

Joking aside, we are headed into our fifth year of conversations with organizations on how they plan to lead in the future. The one-off conversations we had with visionaries in 2005 have now become the common mantra for ambitious organizations. Here are a few things we now hear daily:

- R&D no longer just for insiders - whether its world health organizations, or global enterprises, there is a broadly-held acknowledgement that reaching out to partners, suppliers, or the broad public is the new necessary means of invention for new products, new technologies, solutions to obstacles that have held back performance

- Blind product launches becoming obsolete - the high adrenalin sport of independently guessing what the market will consume or embrace is increasingly a game of yesteryear. Whether by inviting consumers to be part of an ongoing community that provides input on new needs and current product enhancements or running pre-market tests of products or product design/branding, the tools have become too simple and affordable for product and marketing teams to ignore.

- Employee discovery is going open - both by inviting employees of any role and rank to have a say in improving products, services and overall company performance and by utilizing crowdsourcing as a means to discover bright minds as next hires, open contribution technologies are changing how people connect with and drive organization’s growth.

As we look ahead and consider how crowdsourcing will continue to evolve in the New Year, we remain curious and humble despite our iconic rank as verb of the year alongside H1N1 as the fear of the year.

Happy 2010 everyone!

To all those following and supporting us at Chaordix – thank you for a great year! In just a short period of time we’ve emerged as the market leader in crowdsourcing thought leadership, proven methodologies and enabling technology! The conversations and projects we’ve had an opportunity to work on have been rewarding and inspiring to all of us here on the Chaordix team.

We continue to innovate in fostering crowd contribution of collective intelligence (wisdom) and crowd production (tasks performed by your crowd) by providing technology, crowd recruitment, moderation and crowdsourcing planning know how to clients. We’ve heard repeatedly that our vision for Crowdsourcing for the organization - whether an enterprise, non-profit, government or academic – is the right one, we believe it too. We are excited to be living out this vision with each of you.

The foundation of our belief system and what crowdsourcing affords each organization - distributed power, diversity and ingenuity – comes from the visionary founder of Visa, Dee Hock. He imagined & built an organization that could find the right balance of chaos and order.

What’s on our roadmap for 2010:

• Crowdsourcing gone multi – equipping organizations for multiple outputs (ideas, R&D answers, visuals and video) via multiple crowdsourcing models (contest, collaborative, panel led) will remain core to the value of Chaordix™ products
• The future is mobile – watch for news on our strategy in 2010
• Localization – with our recent partner announcements in the Netherlands, France, Italy – we recognize that crowdsourcing in each of these markets requires specific cultural and language knowledge.  Be watching for more announcements coming in the new year including South America, Asia and Europe.
• Our very own crowdsourcing – yep, we’ve done lots of it with our inaugural community cambrianhouse.com and others, we’ll be starting more crowdsourcing communities in 2010, including our own.

What are we most proud of? The opportunity to change the world for the better – from inventive and collaborative enterprise or community, to a non-profit making an impact locally or globally, governments that are accountable & transparent with their citizens, to academic institutions that invest in new solutions for a sustainable, safe planet. All of these are examples of successful crowdsourcing and we believe every worthy organization is or will be building their very own crowdsourcing strategy in the very near future.

From all of us at Chaordix - best wishes for the holiday season!

We look forward to an exciting 2010 with all of you – our customers, partners, collaborators and followers.

Team Chaordix

Innovation comes from listening AND interpreting what you hear. Traditionally, companies decide internally what to produce and offer it to customers. But there’s a market shift underway led by Dell, Converse, Amazon and others using crowdsourcing to ask customers what they want to buy before they build it.

WIND Mobile launched with an ad campaign that promised to put them in the same league as market driven innovators. On their website, they ask people join the conversation asking about what customers want, how they feel about contracts and their thoughts on fees. We were expectantly waiting for them to launch something DIFFERENT but it seems they’ve delivered a slight twist on a broken monetization model, instead of paying for your handset over the course of your contract, you purchase it up front.

If WIND Mobile was truly having a conversation with their customers, they would have come up with a better solution. It’s clear customers don’t want to pay as much as they currently do, whether it is up front, or over a three year contract. Customers see that mobile users in other countries pay far less than we do here in Canada. If we assume there is a good reason for this, shouldn’t mobile companies being trying to discover innovative profitable solutions that will save customers money as well?

I’m worried about WIND Mobile’s brand strategy for three reasons. First, they seem to be offering the same thing as everyone else, just packaged around “being nice” and listening. Second, they are creating a work-around for the industry, not innovating new solutions. Last, if their strategy doesn’t work, other companies interested in involving their customers in the innovation process will have one more failed example to deter them. It is kind of disappointing when what is possible with crowdsourcing could be so much more.