The ‘trailer’ for ‘the’ crowdsourcing book

It’s pretty safe to say this is the video preview of the crowdsourcing book, considering the author is Jeff Howe, the person who coined the term crowdsourcing in the first place – via this 2006 article in Wired Magazine. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business premieres on Tuesday, August 26, 2008.

Jeff’s definition: “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”… ‘undefined’ meaning that you never know who is really going to end up being the most significant contributor, and the means by allowing those people to emerge is through an ‘open call’.

One of his key quotes in the short video, “It forces companies to approach us as potential partners. That’s much more interesting and exciting. We participate more meaningfully in the process by which those products are created. What we see with the successful forms of crowdsourcing is that they came up organically by the people formerly known as customers…” He goes on to say that web-based communities are becoming the fundamental building blocks of the economy, the equivalent of the industrial era corporation.

So, the next time someone asks you to define crowdsourcing in a couple of minutes, tell them to check out this video as well, the trailer for the upcoming book We-think.

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