[Crowd Leader: Ville Miettinen] The Danger of Declassified Information: We Need to Talk Taxonomy

Let’s face it, no matter how vital it is, taxonomy is never going to be fashionable dinner-time conversation. The very word seems designed to put people off (not even Obama can add a “tax” and stay popular). And that’s before you get to the binomial nomenclature and Latin declensions.

Even so, you don’t need to have a photo of handsome Carl Linnaeus in your wallet to appreciate the importance of systems of names. Where would the theory of evolution be without taxonomy? How else would we humans know our place in the great natural order of things?

How to sort out the crowd (and create a monster)

For some time now, the crowdsourcing industry has been chafing under confusing and overlapping terms. Thanks to Merriam-Webster, the term itself was recently added to an official dictionary. Next time someone asks you “so what the hell is crowdsourcing anyway?” you can smugly reply:

“Actually, it’s the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community.”

It’s a nice, neat, simple definition. It’s also profoundly unhelpful to anyone trying to create a workable crowdsourcing taxonomy. Why? Because (like the European debt crisis) in reality crowdsourcing is messy, fast-growing and extremely hard to predict or control.

Crowdsourcing has always been a multi-layered, definition-defying concept. When he coined the term back in 2006, Jeff Howe originally divided crowdsourcing into four categories: professionals, packagers, tinkerers and the masses (“packagers” and “tinkerers”? What are they, crowdsourcing Disney dwarfs?).

Fundamentally, Jeff’s categories were based on what the crowd produced: tagged photos, internet videos, scientific innovation. Subsequent crowdsourcing taxonomies have also tended to follow this model. But, as Crowd Leader David Bratvold points out, these days there are simply too many crowdsourced products. You’d end up constantly creating new categories just to keep pace. As I said in my speech at CrowdConvention, the term crowdsourcing itself is now so over-applied it’s fast becoming a monster. (After my speech I had a good chat with Jeff about this. For the record, he is no Dr. Frankenstein.)

A fab four?

To make life easier for everyone, the Daily Crowdsource is proposing a new kind of crowdsourcing taxonomy. Its four categories – Microtasks, Macrotasks, Crowdfunding and Contests – are broad, umbrella terms which focus on the crowdsourcing process rather than the product. It’s an ambitious move, one which invites discussion and debate: what if crowdsourcing applications fall between two categories? Are crowdsourced Q&A services (like Quora) Microtasks, Macrotasks or neither? Do paid and voluntary workers need separate sub-groups? Will this enable the owners of sites like microtask.com to buy tropical islands?

We urgently need a crowdsourcing taxonomy which reflects the complexity of our industry. To quote Jeff Howe himself: “something that’s robust enough to bear scrutiny, yet flexible enough to contain all those examples of crowdsourcing we haven’t even encountered”. Can four well-defined “process-based” categories rise to the challenge? Enabling crowdsourcing companies to communicate clearly and accurately what they represent?

I predict some serious taxonomic arm-wrestling ahead. Although it is not the most sexy of subjects, we need to have this discussion if our industry is going to evolve.