Crowdscourcing Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Crowdscourcing - Term Paper Example Today through crowd sourcing, the company can use a huge number of less technical people to carry out complex and highly ingenious tasks at very low costs. As a result, the basic idea behind crowdsourcing is to increase productivity while at the same time reducing involved costs in the production process (Mau, 2004). This involves the use of internet where the company solicits feedback from a community of many active and passionate people, which will help the company in significantly reducing the time that it would take to collect data about the same information in the field through a research or other formal focus groups. Therefore, by having customers involved in the branding activities, marketing and the product design and development processes, the organization can greatly save on the staffing costs required and cater for the numerous risks and uncertainties in the market place (Mau, 2004). History The process of requiring customers to have an input in developing products is not new. However, open-source software has changed the approach by making it possible for many people to be involved in such a process. In today’s technology, it is possible to have numerous people undertake tasks that would seem too complex for their level of technical knowledge, mainly driven by factors such as the development of blogs social networks such as Facebook, twitter, MySpace and YouTube. This has made the traditional differences producers and consumers to vanish and leave a thin line that becomes hard to isolate, leading to a market that has a collective intelligence (Brabham, 2008). In other words, in the market today, it is possible to access people’s passion, knowledge, their creative ideas and insightful thinking. This translates to improved production and increased innovations numerous minds are brought together in an economy driven by intellectuals. Open source code, the invention of Stallman an MIT graduate that dates back to 1983 has made crowdsourcing in the IT a great success and has helped companies to reap big from crowdsourcing. This led to development of Unix operating system by 1991 where the developer Linus Torvalds, a computer scientists based in Finland requested ideas from people on how to develop a free operating system, which led to the current Linus operating system, which is the globally largest and world most successful open code software today (Howe, 2008). In interface design, users create socially adaptable interfaces that address interface complexity where users come up with customizations linked to specific tasks, which are then made available to an online community through an online repository. Once the users have created a collection of test sets, the users then customize the interfaces created with a keyword search in finding and installing specific task sets, resulting to a situation where users can issue direct commands to the interface. Therefore, crowdsourcing has its origin from academic researchers w ho designed digital resources that supported research and data interpretation methods, which involved visualization of data, computational analysis, data mining and simulations (Oomen & Aroyio, 2011). Consequently, in interface design, the result was that users were henceforth able to automate difficult tasks to compute,