ChB:PhD

Some people write books about crowdsourcing; some people even use it as a means of writing books on social networking and crowdsourcing. And, of course, we all talk about it. Indeed, I’ve just been to two conferences where it was either the main topic or at least high on the agenda.

At the ninth meeting of the Digital Cultural Content Forum (DCCF) in Berlin we spent a morning on crowdsourcing and at Beyond Collections in Oxford, led by the RunCoCo team, the whole day was dedicated to community engagement. Some two years ago Chris Batt Consulting did a study for the JISC. Digitization, Curation and Two-Way Engagement looked at the past relationship between higher education and communities, activity within other domains such as museums, libraries and archives and also the third sector. It concluded with suggestions on how future programmes of engagement might best develop new and lasting relationships between institutions, communities and individuals. The report pointed out that crowdsourcing/two-way engagement is not a single approach, but a big umbrella under which are clustered a number of different but similar activities.

At the DCCF meeting there was discussion concerning the extent to which curatorial staff could or should give up control of their own knowledge, enabling anyone to contribute on a reasonably level playing field. Will anti-social behaviour (anti-social networking) corrupt high quality cataloguing information or metadata, or might the benefits of opening up previously guarded information, in the way that has been done through public tagging in documentation systems of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, create new and lasting relationships and synergies between the institution and the public? This is a debate to be heard in many places and many institutional contexts.

Certainly, there are many good examples of where engagement by communities has made possible things that would have otherwise been unimaginable. We heard about a number of these at the Beyond Collections event, from the Zooniverse, where citizen scientists are providing the capacity to analyse large data sets; from the team that have crowdsourced the transcription of the Jeremy Bentham archive held by University College London; the building of new individual and community narratives around the history of the Strand in London (Strandlines) and the recent joint venture between the RunCoCo team, Europeana and the Deutsche Nationalbibliotek touring Germany to record thousands of new items from lofts and cupboards. Outside of these public sector examples there is the granddaddy of crowdsourcing, Wikipedia and thousands of clones, plus teams crowdsourcing the design of cars and other consumer products.

Apart from making the obvious point that there is as yet no clear and definite route through this dialectical dilemma, professional values alongside institutional tradition and the need to protect ownership rights are all genuine issues to be dealt with. At the same time, it is evident that new relationships with those outside the institution have enriched collections, done the impossible and provided new insights into the knowledge and interests of the public.

There is a need to get under the skin of these issues, but having examined some of the landscape in the Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement report, I don’t want or need to go too far here. What I do want refer to is something that struck me recently and may have already hit you. That is there are a whole bunch of very different things going on under the umbrella of crowdsourcing and, indeed, under the even bigger umbrella of Web 2.0/social networking. Using the terms as a ‘shorthand’, I think is becoming less and less useful to sensible debate. Rather, we need look more closely at the relevance of crowdsourcing to the particular circumstance.

In his book Crowdsourcing: how the power of the crowd is driving the future of business Jeff Howe brigades crowdsourcing activities under the four chapter headings:

• what the crowd knows,
• what the crowd creates,
• what the crowd thinks and,
• what the crowd funds.

And the regular reader of Wired Magazine will be aware that crowdsourced activity now embraces activities as diverse as designing cars and seeking a cure for diabetes.

I thought I would share my working typology of crowdsourcing behaviours within the domain of knowledge institutions. They may all share two-way engagement, but that is about all:

• Analysis and review of datasets. Galaxy Zoo and its offsprings such as Old Weather; the transcription of Jeremy Bentham’s archive; Public Catalogue Foundation Your Paintings project
• Contributing new knowledge and knowledge objects. Great War Archive; Their Past Your Future; various projects within Flickr Commons
• Expressing opinions and impressions. This category includes the ways in which those external to the organization are able to comment on services (open blogs) or knowledge assets are interpreted and presented (tagging).
• Interest self-management. This category and the next represent behaviours derived from the above activities. Interest self-management is the manifestation of group dynamics into communities of interest: members of the crowd converging around common interests stimulated by the crowdsourcing activity. The various interest groups in Galaxy Zoo and those focused on collections at the Powerhouse Museum are obvious examples.
• Policies and the crowd. This relates to the ways in which the behaviours of the crowd are interpreted and integrated into the policies and objectives of the institution and remains, at best, inchoate. It does seem to me that the up-swelling of information that comes from two-way engagement offers a rich seam for service development. It is, after all, the voice of the motivated. Where that collective voice conflicts with or diverges from the received opinion of institutional/professional values, it ought to be listened to rather than dismissed.

I don’t make any claims for this list. It is inelegant and lacks completeness. Nevertheless, if sustained and genuine engagement turns out to be the way of the future I do think greater sophistication in the working of crowdsourcing needs to be achieved soon rather than later.