I'm sure all of us have had experiences with the bishop or our wards talking about doing indexing for New Family Search. It's a great opportunity to do service, but also gets the church a ton of free labor. Don't get me wrong, I think it's brilliant of them, especially since so many people are willing to do it. I'm just amazed that it actually works. I'm amazed that, just like Kristin said, people are willing to do so much for free. Not just with their programming, but with any of their skills.
It reminds me of what we were talking about in class last time, the fact that the majority of a random population can be more accurate than even experts. I guess we've always known this in some form or another, but it's interesting to see how it actually is true. I mean, a whole bunch of guys screaming at a TV football game claim to know better than the coach, but nobody actually believes them. Who knows though, maybe they do.
I think that the idea of outsourcing is incredibly revolutionary. We used to only rely on expert advice, and maybe only a little bit on our neighbors experience. Or at least that's how it would appear to be. I remember listening in one of my science classes at the very beginning of college, and hearing them say, "I don't understand why people keep arguing about global warming. It's real. We've proven it a million times. It's not really up for discussion anymore." But it still is. Of course, in that example we could argue all day over whether the population or the experts are correct (ignoring the fact that the public appears to still be split on the issue, at least last time I checked) but the idea that experts can be circumvented amazes me. And what's more, the fact that they can be circumvented and be RIGHT.
However, I did want to talk a little bit about the times where outsourcing can be a problem. Mainly on the issues where you really do need to have professional advice. It's easy to go online and google your symptoms and convince yourself that you have cancer, or to find a whole bunch of extremely uneducated comments about Miss America on twitter. So not all of our information and knowledge should come from the masses, but outsourcing to get free labor is good. I remember that line from MIB, when Kay says,
And who knows what we'll learn tomorrow. And who knows what people will be able to do when everyone stops following the hive mind and starts thinking for themselves. That's something that I think outsourcing does really well. It takes the collective "persons" of the population and puts them together. And instead of everyone following one leader or turning into panicky animals, they think for themselves and get things done. Like with New Family Search. Thousands of people working together to make something amazing.
I think you need to keep clear the difference between outsourcing (done by businesses, not necessarily related to the digital age) and crowdsourcing (which has to do with leveraging the reach and scale of online connections). It's good to be a critic, especially of things that could be a fad. But I invite you to consider that people working together may in fact be not less intelligent but moreso. Look at some of Paul's examples in his post on crowdsourcing. That said, I still think there is room to critique what types of crowdsourcing seem to work best. Recall from the lecture that there is a real difference between crowdsourcing labor and crowdsourcing, say, the solution of a complex medical or scientific problem.
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