A couple of weeks ago we looked at some examples of co-creation including community product design. This approach often involves harnessing the 'wisdom of crowds' (or crowdsourcing as it's know). We wrote about the case of t-shirt design and manufacturer, Threadless, which is often cited as an example of crowdsourcing. Today I came across a site that is also based on this wisdom of crowds philosophy, but one that uses it to solve more personal problems than business ones.
SideTaker presents two sides of a situation and then asks the 'crowd' to suggest what steps they should take or to vote on who they think is in the right. The case below is typical. She enjoys spending money and thinks it unfair that he doesn't like her doing this; he thinks that she has no appreciation of the value of money. They then allow the unknown crowd of people to suggest how they might resolve this.
This is a great example of crowdsourcing in action. People have a problem they can't solve themselves and so they look for a wider selection of people to make suggestions based on their experiences, expertise and knowledge. In the same way that Dell's IdeaStorm and Starbuck's MrStarbucksIdea make use of external expertise to solve business problems, so SideTaker does for personal problems.
The principal of crowdsourcing is sound. Online communities of people are able to come together to solve problems. They each bring their own expertise and experiences and their own opinions on a subject. The online environment enables them to collaborate, to make suggestions and to develop ideas and responses with each other over time.
The same reasons that people are able to cocreate and innovate online in this way mean that this is also a vibrant and powerful resource for research. Over the next few days we are going to be looking at how people can collaborate in online research communities to bring insights for brands and to solve problems.
Some more reading
- Co-creation 5: Community product design
- Name This: The Crowdsourced Naming Agency
- Wisdom of crowds - a puzzle
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