Crowdsourcing involves harnessing and channeling the efforts of many individuals who contribute their time to create and improve a collective project. An example is The Commons, a project initiated by the Library of Congress. Individuals are encouraged to contribute ‘tags’ and comments, via the web, to unnamed photos that the Library of Congress has in their archives. Each photograph, and thereby the whole project, is therefore “improved” by the information that has been added by “the crowd.” The crowd is the source for the information it is adding.
It may be that the desire to collaborate on a crowdsourcing project scratches a societal itch that goes a long way back into our collective human past. An article in The Economist (July 30, 2011: 73-74) entitled “Welcome Stranger: The Evolution of Generosity”, suggests that instinctively, humans have an urge to involve themselves in acts of “unconditional generosity”. The article posits that present-day humans, have a “generosity gene”, inherited from our early human ancestors. It goes on to suggest that we are pre-programmed to help strangers, because in our long-distant past, we had to cooperate with others to fight wars, joining together to defeat common foes. Humans are by their very nature social and cooperative beings. Does this help to explain the success of Wikipedia?
That's such an interesting point Andrew. We are, by nature, social and collaborative beings. There are so many examples of this in social media: twitter chats, crowdsourcing, wikis. Thanks for sharing!
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