Institute For The Future

Is Crowdsourcing on the Verge of a Breakout?

Next week, IFTF will be one of the participants in the annual CrowdConf event reviewing progress in crowdsourcing. Looking through the topics to be addressed, an image of an emerging industry on the verge of transition begins to take shape.

As IFTF has continued its decade-long series of dives into the Future of Work, crowdsourcing has repeatedly emerged as an area of interesting innovation. As long ago as 2003, the appearance of pioneering online work platforms like oDesk began spurring conversations about the form that future jobs could take.

Today, however, a new generation of crowd-based projects is pushing the limits of group working technologies and seem to strongly hint that crowdsourcing itself may not ultimately be as important as the emergence of the software to coordinate these processes. For example, MIT and Stanford researcher Michael Bernstein’s Soylent platform is able to orchestrate dozens of anonymous contributors on Amazons Mechanical Turk platform in such a way that they can effectively co-author text documents in near real time.

Similarly, the folks at the Bay Area-based startup MobileWorks have developed tools that can route tasks to the people in their crowd who are best suited for a given job at a given time. Indeed, the site has even innovated systems that allow the crowd to propose and vote on approaches to the crowdsourcing process itself. This is essentially collective management within large groups, and for anyone with an Organizational Theory background, the idea is enough to send chills down your spine.

Moving forward,  it is likely that the next few years will see the emergence of  a number of disruptions in this space. However, they may not be from the directions that one might expect. Above all else, it now seems that crowdsourcing could be a catalyst for building new software for the comprehensive management of organizations in general. If so, massive changes in institutional structures and the fundamental ways that we work could be just one side effect of this broader transition.

Welcome to the new world of algorithmic management.