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From Wikipedia to 99designs, and Google to LEGO, crowdsourcing has changed the way the world does business. By partnering with the masses through innovative campaigns, companies can benefit from a vast amount of expertise, enthusiasm and goodwill, rather than from paid labour. But what's in it for the crowd?
Why do ordinary people sign on to help design or produce a product without much compensation? Why do they volunteer their time and skills to a company that profits? And how can a firm better address the crowd's needs in order to to maximize value for all involved in the co-creation project?
Their findings are the first to show that there are four different types of members volunteering in these communities:
1. Communals build skills and community bonds;
2. Utilizers join the communities to sharpen their skills without much intention to form social bonds;
3. Aspirers lack both skills and bonds, but aim to gain more of both;
4. Tourists are minimally invested in both community and skills and infrequently participate.
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-big-businesscrowdsourcing-win-win-situation.html
[Abstract]: Managing Communities of Co-creation around Consumer Engagement Styles
Do you agree and would you be part of such crowd-sourcing initiatives ?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:11PM
Their findings are the first to show that there are four different types of members volunteering in these communities:
1. Communals build skills and community bonds;
2. Utilizers join the communities to sharpen their skills without much intention to form social bonds;
3. Aspirers lack both skills and bonds, but aim to gain more of both;
4. Tourists are minimally invested in both community and skills and infrequently participate.
I can think of several more (some of these will obviously overlap):
5. Grammar nazis and style freaks participate because they have an obsessive desire to fix things and make projects conform to whatever style guide. They sleep better at night knowing they have fixed the commas of the world.
6. Policy freaks (a.k.a. Wikilawyers) have an unnatural desire to create and debate governing policies; they often spend a lot more time debating technical policies than actually creating or editing content. Often they are most satisfied by winning arguments against other members, rather than contributing positively.
7. Police are members who gain satisfaction from fixing member-caused "problems" in the project, often caused by negative contributors (see below).
8. Kings-of-the-hill have an ultimate goal of establishing their little "fiefdom" somewhere in the project, which they would love to govern as a dictatorship; they are generally convinced that their solution to the project within their "fiefdom" is the best for all time.
9. Attention whores are more interested in making their contributions to the project known, rather than actually contributing significantly. They often find ways of gaming metrics for contribution to enhance their profiles.
10. Admins/moderators generally combine a king-of-the-hill complex with an attention whore, as well as some other positive aspects of the other above categories. Depending on the project and the way one can gain admin/moderator privileges, they can vary from exceedingly helpful to the project to forces that actively propagate more dysfunction.
And then you have the other types of volunteers with different goals for their "contributions":
11. Hackers (black hat) gain satisfaction from trying to destroy or disrupt the project, generally by disrupting or finding flaws in the underlying tech.
12. Vandals are also happy to destroy or disrupt things, but act on a more "surface" level, such as vandalizing the text of Wikipedia articles or inserting random crap into the codebase of a project.
13. Wise guys aren't really intent on destruction, but make bad contributions that effectively vandalize the project too, just because it's mildly amusing or they don't consider the consequences (e.g., people who create fake Wikipedia articles).
14. Trolls like to sow social discord among project members, interjecting comments they often don't actually believe in to get the more obsessive categories above (policy freaks, grammar nazis, police) yelling at each other rather than doing something more productive.
Etc., etc. I'm sure other people can come up with more categories.
It seems to me that most of the categories I list here are of people whose primary satisfaction or goal in the project doesn't come from "building skills" OR "community bonds" -- yet they often make up a large proportion of crowdsourced projects. And the more of these obsessive types and wackos and disrupters tend to be around, the harder it is to maintain an active community of more "normal" folks who just contribute in the ways TFA discusses.