“Crowdopolis 2012, the Future of Crowdsourcing in Content Marketing, Advertising & Tech” is a conference about crowdsourcing organized by David Bratvold, founder and CEO of Daily Crowdsourced, the #1 source for crowdsourcing related news.
In this conference, that will take place on july the 19th in Los Ángeles, are going to participate speakers from big companies that use crowdsourcing: Amazon, General Electrics or Nokia. Some speakers from other companies that use the crowdsourcing as its business model will also participate: Ville Miettinen from Microtask, Gioacchino La Vecchia from CrowdEngineering, or Peter LaMotte from Genius Rocket, for example.
One of these speakers is David Alan Grier. David is the IEEE Computer Society elected president, but also is professor at the George Washington University and he is executive director in crowdsortium.org, a group of crowdsourcing industry practitioners that have organized themselves with the mission of advancing the crowdsourcing industry through best practices, education, data collection, and public dialog. His writing and work deal with the interactions between technology and people, how technology changes organizations and systems and ways of interacting. David usually participates in Daily Crowdsourced publishing articles relating to some aspect of crowdsourcing.
In recent days I have been able to propose him some questions about crowdsourcing and his participation in Crowdopolis. Here you have the answers.
Question: David, could you please explain me your relationship with crowdsourcing?
Answer: For crowdsourcing, I play the role of instant respectability. I wrote a book about how we organized computation before we had machines, which proves to be the exact techniques of crowdsourcing. So I have been arguing that crowdsourcing is just a new form of a well understood and developed set of managerial techniques.
Q.: What are you going to talk about in Crowdopolis?
A.: My talk at crowdopolis is going to be on crowdsourcing and innovation, how it is a process that forces us to think in different ways and to develop new habits to deal with problems and activities that we thought that we understood and that these new habits can be highly useful.
Q.: Today, crowdfunfing is one of the crowdsourcing typologies that more success is achieving in the society. Why do you think that it is so successful?
A.: I think that crowdfunding is successful at the moment because it is new and because it provides capital for people who can make a good pitch but may not have the paper trail to get a conventional loan. I think that we are still in the early days of it and do not yet see how it will operate as a mature activity. I believe and hope that it will retain some if its current free structure but I also suspect that the mature form of crowdfunding will have more conventional financial players than we might like to believe.
Q.: There are some authors that begin to talk about a crowdfunding bubble burst. What do you think about an hipothetic crowdfunding bubble burst?
A.: Crowdfunding is far from mature. It may or may not burst but it will take a little time to settle into a long term form. Along the way we may see a major mistake or two. However, I would not want to venture that it will burst. I suspect that one of these mistakes will force crowdfuinding into a more structured process than we see now with procedures for reducing risk.
Q.: Finally, as a specialist, which future do you think is awaiting crowdsourcing?
A.: I think that crowdfunding will quickly become another set of organizational tools on part with conventional bureaucracy and programmatic control. I think that it will create a new organizational form but that form may not be universally adopted by all institutions. We’ll see an active crowdsourcing industry. We’ll see transformed companies that use crowdsourcing. Yet we will also see conventional institutions.
Thanks for sharing the content of the interview with David Alan Grier. I think the conference that took place at Los Angeles must have witnessed amazing and inspirational thoughts from speakers from big companies that use crowdsourcing. I think it was wonderful information about David Alan Grier you have shared here.