I gave the example of Yahoo! because I believe that they really do value their community.

I’m railing against ‘crowdsourcing’ because it’s a word that, depending on the degree of ignorance, can lead to a lot of false assumptions and putting business interests before community.

I worry because of the business I’m in and because of the conversations I have, in the wild. Because people talk to us about “viral marketing” and about other things that sound good but really aren’t, for anyone.

Baby steps are fine — and those baby steps could be using appropriate language that doesn’t diminish or take for granted community production.

But that’s just me. Knowwhatayemean?

Can you post some examples of corporate crowdsourcing in which the crowd members were forced into their “sweatshop” labor? Considering UnknowingContributer’s anecdote, I assume there are probably more examples of such behavior.

How is it that Yahoo gets exoneration, nay, a downright endorsement as a “good example of corporate community collaboration” while all other “corporate types” are denied even an opportunity at it?

What is the difference between:

1. a corporation allowing (and rewarding) customers to help the corporation’s other customers by creating more and better value

2. a community allowing (and rewarding) members to help the community’s other members by creating more and better value

What’s so awful about “corporations” and “customers” engaging in the same type of process?

What you might see as corporations being exploitative, others might see as corporations’ attitudes shifting. Maybe we should give companies the benefit of the doubt, considering “crowdsourcing” is barely 4 months old. (though isn’t good ol’ fashioned word-of-mouth advertising a form of crowdsourcing?)

If you were going thru a process of proselytizing hard-headed, slow-learning bureaucratic organizations like corporations, is it really a good tactic to beat them over the head with accusations of insincerity if they prefer to take baby steps instead of great leaps?

But then I thought a bit and realized that you’ve brought up a very important distinction that needs to be made clear.

‘Crowdsourcing’ is kind of like sexism in how it objectifies those who would perform work as part of a given effort without respecting them as collaborants for their contributions. In that way, it’s like, as I suggested, sweatshop labor, where the goal is a certain amount of production at ever-lowering wages. From the standpoint of the corporate enterprise, it doesn’t matter what the effects of such wage- and cost-lowering are, so long as product can continue to be shipped and margins increased.

For a positive example of this kind of work — that might be seen by others unfamiliar or unconcerned with the ethos of open source production as ‘crowdsourcing’ — look at the Spread Firefox campaign. It was, in fact, initially believed to be a lark, something that might help spread the Fox, but ultimately wouldn’t necessarily have that big of an impact (especially when compared with a big media thrust). Instead, Firefox set the model of community evangelism in software — but rather than being staggered at what a good community can do for itself and for products it believes in, many in the business community gawked at how cheaply Firefox was able to market itself.

So in any case, there is a huge amount of potential when tools are developed in the interest of and for communities. That’s community co-production — where everyone wins, and it’s not just about the corporate interests.

“I am more optimistic about their approach of using a simple browser plugin to enable folks to casually point out faces in the images that they come across, effectively decentralizing the task and providing a much needed instant-incentive for folks who are specifically interested in this kind of information.”

Folks like, say, the Department of Homeland Security? I share your concerns about the exploitation of volunteer labor, and I think the dangers are especially great in the domain of video and image indexing.

Some links you may be interested in:

Recognition Markets and Visual Privacy
Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy