[Crowd Leader: David Alan Grier] Preparing A Good Crowdsourcing Taxonomy

In preparing a good taxonomy, we need a set of categories that can be applied to the entire “industry,” divide that world into independent groups, and identify common methodologies. In writing such a document, it is most promising to look at the different processes that employ crowd labor rather than the application of the crowd or the work product. Common products and common applications can be created by a variety of procedures that have little in common. In contrast, a common procedure may exhibit the same benefits and the same problems when applied to many different settings.

At the moment, we are seeing four categories emerge that seem to capture the different aspects of crowdsourcing. These categories are defined by the relationship of the worker to the work and to those that control the production process. The four categories are Crowd Contests, Microtasking, Macrotasking (or fractional employment), and Crowdfunding. In putting them before you, the Daily Crowdsource is looking for comments and ideas from the field itself. Can the definitions be refined? Are some of these categories too broad? Only by working with the crowdsourcing space as a whole can we begin to understand the true structure of the field.

In addition to the temptation to define the field by applications, it’s also tempting to define the categories of crowdsourcing by scale, setting aside one label for large processes and a second for small ones. This, too, is a misleading approach. It is difficult to find a clear break between large and small processes. Further, we will likely find that big processes will be getting bigger and bigger as we gain skill in the field. It is possible that we will need a side category that deals with the problems of managing very large crowd processes, but the underlying process will be based on an existing category.

So here are the basic ideas for a taxonomy of crowdsourcing as presented by the Daily Crowdsource. We now need to discuss these categories collectively, as an “industry,” and refine the concepts. It would be a reasonable goal to assimilate the comments and produce a stable document by the time CrowdConf opens its doors this November.