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Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.

Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine

I bet, everyone of you at least once in the life felt that your manager is the bottleneck to your creativity and your ideas are underrated. If I’m right, you should know perfectly, what do the phrases “we are considering your proposal” and “we will definitely include this in the next version” mean. Your boss, who in the most cases knows better then you what the market needs (I’m not kidding – people don’t become managers by accident), just wants to protect you against stress. But lets imagine, your amazing, brilliant idea is one of those 20%, which can make 80% of business. What will you do? Go to the boss of your manager? Come on, don’t be a fool – the chance to succeed is really, really small, whilst the relationships with your direct chief will be blown up for sure. The same outcome is expected, if you will be coming to the boss with your ideas over and over again - the head will stay unbending, whereas your creativity will slowly run out.

Modern development practices recognize the importance of this problem and try to solve it setting up direct connections between representatives of different parties (sometimes lowering the influence of project managers). Underside of this approach is that the change motivated by chaotic unstructured communications can lead to even bigger ambiguity, and finally you won’t have any solution to the problem. You can find some order in running brainstorming sessions – good old way to collect fresh points of view. But brainstorms are expensive (in terms of time and special atmosphere they require), so you can hardly afford setting them up on a regular basis and make them a part of your process. You need some kind of solution that will continuously collect ideas (in the background), measure their market value and will give outlet for those employees who can’t keep still.

Internal Crowdsourcing

When it comes to prototyping or planning of internal applications for the enterprise, the common practice is to involve into collaboration process representative(s) of the user party. Normally, they’re the heads of departments (marketing, sales, etc.) or just the most experienced users; in total, no more than 3-4 persons, who can define, whether a technically implementable and economically sound requirement has any sense for users. Whilst those persons can have impact on the development process, specifying requirements and assessing viability of ideas, the main reason of their presence is to help building the cultural bridge between users and new applications (IOW, to get the users ready for change). The problems is that, like with any other kind of mediators, user representatives, who aggregate demands of the community and promote them to other parties (technical, business), can be inaccurate in their conclusions and vision of major demands. At the end of the day, the things that users really want can be out of the picture. Internal crowdsourcing will help to setup many-to-many relationships between users and other parties. Without slowing the planning and development processes down, it may continuously reveal bottlenecks and impediments that users face interacting with the system.

Employees of customer service, marketing, sales and other departments are those who use internal applications on a daily basis (literally breath those application) and have a very deep insight into them. Working with the applications they admit the problems that doesn’t let them act effectively, or things they lack that will increase the productivity. If they try to push those points forward via bug-tracking engine (create a ticket for a proposal), they have a very little chance to succeed – the ticket most likely will be treated as “not a bug” and put off. With crowdsourcing application as the place where employees can submit their ideas, no brilliant ones will be lost. Filtering and promotion of ideas is managed internally by the crowd, so the hottest ones are always highlighted and very little external impact is required. Compared with other media tricks, internal crowdsourcing resembles self-organized continuous brainstorming, most of all.

Crowd self-management is achieved with voting for the best ideas. At any moment of time, employee should have access to all the ideas submitted by other users, but not evaluated by the crowdsourcer yet (evaluated means accepted for implementation, or rejected). Voting up or down for ideas and collaborating on them, crowd members not only push the best ideas forward, but also adjust them during communication.

Using internal crowdsourcing judiciously, you can find this simple concept doing the following for you:

• Stimulating innovations. End users can be authors of innovative ideas that will increase share in existing markets, add new value to a current project and help entering new markets. Fresh eyed users can see the problem in a new light;
• Solving impediments. Users may have problems using existing products, or have no ability (functionality) to do what they want. Crowdsourcing may reveal the most popular impediments;
• Highlighting creative agents. Management may be interested in figuring out the most creative employees for the future;

Employees on themselves have a strong motivation to share ideas, which can also be stirred up with money or public approval.

• the opportunity to make money (crowdsourcer provides benefits for the best ideas);
• fun (the process of generation and promoting ideas is exciting);
• opportunity to earn a reputation as a creative person and innovator;
• know about other creative persons in the company (build a network of innovators);
• creative outlet;
• kill time when bored;

Crowdsourcing application

The simplest realization of the crowdsourcing paradigm is “Idea Box”. The concept behind “Idea Box” is extremely straightforward: users submit fresh ideas to the crowdsourcing application (put ideas into “the box”);crowdsourcer aggregates them, and picks the best to implement.

In our implementation, main “Idea Box” window looks similarly to dzone.com and digg.com:

• Ideas approved by moderators are dynamically added to the stack of ideas. Users can up/down-vote the ideas they like/dislike (to promote them in the top of ideas to be implemented), collaborate on idea with author and other user in comments and remove idea from the box. Moderator with a wider permissions can accept/reject ideas at the same screen, and remove those of them that are already evaluated;

• Best ideas with the highest rating (up votes – down votes) are displayed on the same screen. The most popular ideas will be evaluated as early as possible;

• “Top authors” widget. Exposes the most creative users ordered by the sum of votes for their ideas;

• Submit a new idea. On this screen user posts new ideas, and gives a short description to them. When the idea is submitted, it’s added to the internal queue of ideas that require moderation. It’s done in order to filter the spam and duplicates out of the public queue. The idea won’t be visible for anyone excepting the author and moderators, until it’s reviewed and accepted.

• View the idea. User can view idea description, vote up/down for the idea, or remove it from the stack at this screen. If the idea is not reviewed by an administrator yet, accept/reject options will be available for super-users.

• User profile. Here user can see the statistics of submitted/accepted ideas and their rating.

This post is the first part in “Idea Box: OSS for internal crowdsourcing” series, which covers market demand and concept of the application. The next chapters will describe the entire lifecycle of the application creation, from mining requirements to rolling out the application to production and setting up a technical support.

References

Brabham, D.C. researches
The Innovation Issue, CRM Magazine

Tags: big brother, corporate culture, IdeaBox, media, project lifecycle, social networks, social technologies

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.