I wrote this in response to this piece on why crowdfunding is superior to crowdsourcing. It was clearly written by someone who hadn’t participated in these kinds of emerging activities. She rips on crowdsourcing, yet she used Wikipedia, a type of crowdsourcing, to write her article (I checked some of her facts, which were clearly pulled from there.) Here’s my response:

They are two completely different things. The only thing they have in common is that the words start with “crowd”. One isn’t superior over the other. Can’t. They’re different platforms for different people for a different purposes. Apples and oranges. There’s going to be successes in both concepts but those successes are measured by two separate criteria.

It’s the major corporate players trying to participate in social media, save a buck, hop on the trendwagon, and get free press that’s undermining the power of crowdsourcing, as shown by the examples above. Allow me to make my case for crowdsourcing.

Mom-and-pop cupcake shop can’t afford the major firms to develop their branding and ad campaign. They’re not national and the return on a $10,000 logo just doesn’t make sense, whereas a $300 crowdSPRING contest may just do the trick. They may get designs deemed “mediocre” by us elitist designers, but they’re good-enough and work’s just fine, because in the end it’s just how the cupcakes tastes anyway. Before crowdsourcing was invented, the little stores were left to ask their cousin’s daughter who knew how to use MS Paint to make the logo for them. I’ll take “mediocre” over “blindingly bad” any day. Crowdsourcing is great for small businesses.

Crowdfunding at its current state rallies around the individual and is still yet to be a true community, because of it’s tool like function. Threadless who’ve baked crowdsourcing right into their business plan has taken it to a new level by creating a vibrant community. Creating an online community is a challenge and every marketer’s dream/nightmare. Threadless did just that resulting in an annual revenue of $30mil+, 1.5mil+ twitter followers and 220,000 facebook fans. They created a rallying space for comfy cute tshirt lovers. Crowdsourcing can create engaged communities.

Wicked problems are daunting and crowdfunding doesn’t have the confidence yet to tackle those problems. Crowdfunding a million dollars to cure cancer, still isn’t going to cut it, while using the computational power and the time of a million people, might. Wicked problems are just starting to be attempted in a traditional crowdsourcing fashion at places like OpenIdeo. Though it does fall short in some respects with the above mentioned criticism, the confidence is leading to experimentation and they’ve done a great job of tweaking the usual crowdsourcing process by inviting experts to synthesize the creative power of many, releasing it back out, and taking it back in, in an iterative cycle. The experts facilitate the crowd to attempt a solution for problems worth solving. I’m also looking very forward to Jane McGonigals’ Gameful, who recently presented at TED, which uses game mechanics paired with crowdsourcing to solve the Wicked Problems. Crowdsourcing is mature enough to tackle the big problems of the world.

Crowdsourcing builds a great online environment for collaboration, community awareness and engagement. It may not be the next emerging trend, but it’s at a point where it’s evolving at a healthy pace. Both conceptual approaches have their own place and will hopefully evolve in their own way into something even more wonderful.