Acronym

In today's opening session talk with Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing (and the Crowdsourcing blog), one point that Howe made seemed to resonate with the audience: Quoting from his book, he said that "We know that crowdsourcing exists because we've watched it flourish in the wild. We've had a harder time breeding it in captivity."

And, of course, associations looking at ways to tap into the idea of crowdsourcing would be breeding it in captivity. So what can associations do to successfully "domesticate" crowdsourcing?

A few of the points he made seemed to be particularly germane:

- The technological aspect should be invisible, or at least as invisible as you can make it. Crowdsourcers should be thinking about the task they're trying to accomplish, rather than focusing on the technology.

- Be aware that the crowd will expect to have a voice to go along with its labor. Howe said, "To anyone who cut their teeth in online communities, democracy isn't a concept, it's a habit." Whenever decisions are imposed on the group from above, you'll be going against the grain.

- Howe called crowdsourcers "the coffee break labor force." In a lot of successful crowdsourcing communities, the tasks participants are taking part in are things they can readily accomplish over a coffee break--voting for the best t-shirt design, uploading a photo or a set of photos. It reminds me of an idea I've heard Cynthia D'Amour talk about--what she calls the 15 Minute Club, where an association lists tasks on its website that volunteers can easily accomplish in 15 minutes. Think in terms of small chunks of time.

- Focus on the community, not on yourself. Howe cited what he calls the "cardinal rule of crowdsourcing": "Ask not what your community can do for you; ask what you can do for your community." More specifically, he described the success of Dell's IdeaStorm crowdsourcing project; Howe said the project was successful because Dell focused on trying to do something for its customers instead of trying to get its customers to do something for it. If we focus our association crowdsourcing attempts on benefit to the association rather than to the members, we could be dooming our domestication effort before it begins.