With social media and how easily people can become connected, it is only logical that crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and prediction markets are starting to become more and more popular. With the Internet, one person can have access to over millions of people. That is a big reason as to why those three topics work. All three of these topics reach out to the crowd for support and wouldn’t be able to function without them.
The first article, “The Collective Intelligence Genome” is a very easy to understand break up of what exactly collective intelligence is. The article breaks up the idea of collective intelligence into four main questions. The first question is what is the goal of the activity? The second question is who is doing these activities? Why do people participate in the activity? The final question is how is the crowdsourcing being done?
The second article, “What Kind of Collaboration is Right For You?” outlines the different methods of collaboration for crowdsourcing. They mention that there are two modes of collaboration: closed and open. With closed collaboration, you are assuming that you have picked the people who will be able to create the best content. In my opinion, that is very risky because there are so many potential contributors you never reached out to solely because you didn’t have access to them.
The third article, “Prediction Markets: A New Tool for Strategic Decision Making,” explains how companies and organizations make strategic decisions based on what the crowd predicts will happen. The article even argues that prediction markets are even more accurate than forecasting software. The reason I think this is true is because when so many people are involved in making the prediction, they are all basing their prediction on the knowledge that they have. Of course, no one person can know everything and therefore when there is a crowd, you are bringing together pieces of information that each person has. So the overall prediction is a combination of pieces of information from individual people.
The article of choice that I included is about what makes crowdfunding work. Before reading this article, I assumed it would be fairly easy to reach your fund goal if it is fairly low, but the overall goal of the fund isn’t only what matters. People need to believe in your campaign and be motivated to donate. Just seeing your campaign as they browse through the website isn’t enough motivation. You need to put in a lot of effort to market your campaign and you need to have a truly unique idea.
The two cases that I chose to compare and contrast where two crowdsourcing sites called Trevolta and Kickstarter. A huge difference is what types of projects people can create. On Travolta, it is restricted to traveling, while Kickstarter has a greater variation of types of projects. Therefore I think a more specific type of person is attracted to Trevolta while Kickstarter appeals to the more general public.
