

Crowdsourcing and user generated firings - olefoo
http://www.rogerd.net/articles/crowdsourcing-and-user-generated-firings

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run4yourlives
I think "crowdsourcing" is a bit of a flaky concept, really. You're not
getting anything valuable from Average Joe, you're either getting a democratic
assessment of something (ie, 1K Average Joes), which is nothing new, or you
are tapping into the top 1% of a particular niche.

That being said, the concept of firing your employees to tap the crowd as an
entity for free is completely flawed.

What I find more likely to happen is that the crowd, whether the 1% or the
group as a whole will begin to understand the value they create and will start
to charge for that value. If the business community wants to hasten that
reaction by ensuring the crowd is as under-employed as possible, then so be
it. This generation of workers has shown themselves to be much more adaptable
than "super efficient" businesses ever were.

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olefoo
The thing about crowdsourcing in tech support is that the crowd is the one
that's experienced the problem, and is practiced in using the solution. The
thing that Brad Smith does not understand is that the technical support staff
from Intuit play a different role in the ecosystem around his product than
user experts; and removing the in-house tech staff would likely drive away the
user experts.

I don't think the 'crowd' is going to wake up and start charging for things
they currently do for free because the most effective forms of crowdsourcing
depend on small individual contributions being given collective effectiveness
by the context.

