Commercial crowdsourcing should be called Crowd-competition
There are some commercial crowdsourcing initiatives that makes me wonder: is this a fair way of doing business? Take 99designs.com for instance, a design-contest site. The deal is this: as an employer I don’t have to select designers upfront, on the basis of a designers portfolio, I just run a contest. The designer whose design win get paid, all losers get nothing. This is called “an independent online design marketplace” (Brad Howarth, Smart Company, November 25, 2008) or “a job site” (Sue Kwon, CBS Broadcasting Inc, December 8, 2008). Obviously it isn’t both. It is a contest site. Why isn’t this clearly stated? This so-called crowd sourcing initiative is committed to protecting designers’ intellectual property rights – “after all, we’re talking about your rights!”. The fact is that the work that is protected, is tailor-made design work: not suitable for re-use, not suitable for reoffering this in an open marketplace.
More than 20,000 graphic designers have registered on 99designs.com. At free will of course, and as we are aware, free will is a relative fact, dependent on our economic situation for instance. We should be very careful not to abuse the labor of many. Let’s not call commercial crowdsourcing a product marketplace or a job site: these are misleading, victimizing descriptions. Let call it contests or crowd-competitions with small prizes and rewards: that’s more realistic. This crowd-competitions doesn’t have to be a bad thing of course. For instance, it can be used as an instrument for students to engage real world challenges and testing skills. But other instruments, like peer-production or co-creation seems to be a better choice for students, because not only products, services or graphic designs are created but cooperation skills are trained on top of that. So lets go for crowd-cooperation instead of crowd-competition.
