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Have you ever been in a situation where you have waited for almost an hour and no matter how much you wave, you just cannot seem to get a taxi and in that moment , you just wish that one out of the many cars that pass you would just stop and give you a lift? Or have you ever thought of putting your driving skills to good use and at the same time, earn some extra cash by being a taxi driver for a day?

Well, with Uber, now you can! Uber is a ridesharing service that uses a smartphone application to connect passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire. Customers use the app to request rides and track their reserved vehicle’s location. There are many functions that makes Uber so attractive. Firstly, passengers do not have to provide their exact location if they don’t know the address. The app uses gps location to track down the exact location of the passenger and the app will locate the closest driver such that the ride will appear within minutes, preventing long periods of unnecessary waiting. Furthermore, transactions are cashless. Once you arrive at your destination, the fare is automatically charged to the credit card on file. Passengers can also retrieve a fare quote prior to riding the car just by keying in the pickup location and destination. Lastly, to increase efficiency, passengers also have the option of spliting the fare with other passengers through the app. The application was such a success that as of 2014, just 5 years after it was founded, Uber was available in 37 countries and 128 cities worldwide, and was valued at US$18.2 billion (NYTimes, 2014)

Peer-to-peer marketplaces like Uber are redefining the way people travel by establishing new services that forgo traditional providers in favor of individual or community-based transactions. By connecting like-minded people around shared needs, affinities and experiences, these collaborative business models promote local authenticity, while offering more cost-effective and efficient options around essential aspects of travel like transportation, accommodation and internet access (PSFK, 2014).

Another example of how crowdsourcing helps customers seek solutions for common travel problems is CrowdRoaming. CrowdRoaming is a startup that is working to give users 100 percent free internet access while traveling overseas. The company aims to bring the sharing economy to mobile roaming by letting locals share their WiFi with travellers, and vice versa, when they themselves go overseas. The goal is for travelers to have access to a wide network of free data when they travel, and all they need to do in return is offer up their own WiFi network to fellow travelers when they are back home (PSFK, 2014).

Being an avid traveller myself, I think it is amazing that people are leveraging on the wisdom of the crowd to make day-to-day events simpler and more efficient. Fast taxis and free WiFi; you have just made my day. Can you think of any other unique ways in which crowdsourcing has helped the travel/tourism/transportation industry?

References

“How Crowdsourcing Is Taking the Headache Out of Travel” PSFK. N.p., 21 Oct. 2014. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.

“Why Uber Might Well Be Worth $18 Billion.” NYTimes. N.p., 9 June 2014. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

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Whenever we are stuck with a difficult problem in school or at work, our common first reaction would be to ask a friend or colleague for help. When we do that, we are actually tapping on collective intelligence – the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization (Levy, 1997) – to help us solve daily issues. This is in a way crowd sourcing at the most basic level.

The article “The Collective Intelligence Genome” (Malone, Laubacher and Dellarocas, 2010) propagates that to build exactly the kind of complex intelligence system that will accomplish an organization’s desired job, managers have to ask four main questions: “What? Who? Why? How?” The answers to these 4 questions will eventually define the “genes”, or the core building blocks of collective intelligence, and these genes when appropriately combined and recombined with one another under suitable conditions would then successfully and sustainably allow companies to design a system that will harness collective intelligence in a way that will meet their needs.

Another perspective on how companies can strategies their crowdsourcing efforts comes from the article “Which type of collaboration is right for you?” (Pisano and Verganti, 2008). By combining participation factors (open/closed) with governance factors (flat/hierarchical), the article presents four basic modes of collaboration and companies can figure out which mode is most appropriate by being focused on their organizational strategy and considering the trade-offs of each mode.

The last article “Prediction Markets: A new tool for strategic decision making” highlights how companies can leverage on the masses to achieve strategic decisions in times of uncertainty through an emerging tool called prediction markets. The article favors prediction markets over current practice due to its advantages in theoretical foundation, empirical evidence, and credibility/defensibility. However, it also highlights limitations that might arise through prediction markets such as predictive errors, manipulation and problematic long-term forecasting (Borison and Hamm, 2010).

One example of an organization from the private sector which has achieved the right permutation of “open, closed, flat, and hierarchical” (Pisano and Verganti, 2008) is Quirky – a New York City based invention company that crowdsources its product ideas from people all over the world before selling the winning products online or through partner retail stores like Target and Best Buy (Forbes, 2013). On the other hand, in the non-profit sector, we can see how crowdsourcing can also be a useful tool to aid in disaster relief. One example would be how volunteer organizations in Guinea and Sierra Leona have used open-mapping to help them efficiently locate Ebola-infected victims in rural areas (Reuters, 2014).

In conclusion, there is no doubt that there are many benefits to crowdsourcing such as reach, speed, low cost, flexibility and efficiency. Yet, organizations also need to be aware of the various limitations that come with this tool such as uncertainty, data inaccuracy, ethical issues and security threats, and understand when and how best to use it, so as to achieve the results they are looking for.

References:

Borison, A., and Hamm, G. 2010. Prediction markets: A new tool for strategic decision making. California Management Review 52(4) 125-141

“Can A Crowdsourcing Invention Company Become ‘The Best Retailer In The World?'” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 27 May 2013. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.

Levy, P., 1997. Collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace.

Malone, T.W., Laubacher, R., and Dellarocas, C. 2010. The collective intelligence genome. MIT Sloan Management Review 51(3) 21-31

“Online Volunteers Map Uncharted Ebola Zones to Help save Lives.” Trust.Org, 23 Sept. 2014. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.

Pisano, G.P., and Verganti, R. 2008. Which kind of collaboration is right for you? Harvard Business Review 86(12) 78-86

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Recent news in West Africa has shown that, indeed, open sourcing can help to prevent Ebola. However, before I go any further, let me first elaborate more on the term “open sourcing”. Based on the definition provided by Webopedia, open source refers to any program in which the source code is made available to the general public for use or modification from its original design free of charge. This means that anybody and everybody can work on the same material conveniently and efficiently; and in doing so, collaborate with one another to tackle problems, innovate products and change the way we live.

One example of how open sourcing can help to improve the lives of people emerged a couple of months ago in the midst of the Ebola crisis in West Africa. On the 5th of June 2014, aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF) reported several new Ebola cases in the countries of Guinea and Sierra Leone. This stressed a strong pressure for NGOs and health workers to deliver appropriate aid in the fastest and most effective way to the relevant victims. To do so, it is vital for the relief workers to have a clear picture of the area affected by Ebola and the relevant trends. However, as the outbreaks occurred in very rural areas, most of these places did not have official maps or clear and detailed road directions for the workers to follow. This proved to be a huge challenge that would greatly slow down the Ebola aid relief as doctors could not trace the likely vectors of transmission because they did not know the patterns of peoples’ daily lives, and they were also not able to plan aid delivery effectively.

To overcome this hurdle, MSF enlisted the help of an opensourcing project called OpenStreetMap to encourage people from all over the world, especially those staying in Africa, to help map out the Ebola-infected areas. OpenStreetMap is a project to create a free, open map of the world, built by volunteers through GPS surveying, aerial imagery, and public sources of geographic data. Instead of donating money, around 1200 online volunteers from more than 80 countries have stepped forward to donate their time to help build maps for relief workers. They call themselves the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). HOT maps everything from remote forest passes to school buildings which can be transformed into temporary clinics to open fields for helicopter landings. It has created an organised and comprehensive network tool for relief workers to combat the Ebola disease with. Quoting Audrey Lessard-Fontaine, MSF’s cartographic liaison, “The great thing about it is the speed at which areas can be mapped. Even if we had five staff full-time working on it, we would hardly be able to reach the speed at which dozens, hundreds of volunteers manage to map out a zone”.

Clearly, opensourcing has gone a long way to help the victims of Ebola in Guinea and Siera Leone. I think it is amazing how MSF thought of using open sourcing to turn a mission so impossible into something so tangible and realistic with the help of the general public. Many critics are always quick to jump in and point out the cons of social media and the harms it brings to society. As such, it is always very heartening to see social media bringing people together to do real good in the world. Of course, this is just one example that brought out the benefits of open sourcing such as a greater audience reach, faster lead time, low cost and free advertising. However, open sourcing definitely has its bad side too. So what do the rest of you think? Are there any possible cons to volunteer organisations such as MSF using an open sourcing method to gather support and insight from the general public? If so, how can these organisations work around it so as to enjoy the best of both worlds?

References:

“Using Open Source Mapping to Help Stop Ebola.” SciDev.Net, 9 June 2014. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.

“Online Volunteers Map Uncharted Ebola Zones to Help save Lives.” Trust.Org, 23 Sept. 2014. Web. 16 Oct. 2014.