Cambrian House (review), a website which allowed ideas to be crowdsourced (many people work together) into products, has ‘failed’. They are selling their assets to another venture film for much less than what was invested in it. As their CEO said ‘our model failed’. I am not going into this but you can read all about it here, here and here!
Everybody is saying crowdsourcing has failed but I beg to differ. There are so many successful collaborative, crowdsourced projects left. Whilst they may not style themselves as a crowdsourced project, it’s hard to argue that they are not!
The most successful crowdsourced project has to be Wikipedia. How many other encyclopedias can boast 2,000,000 articles made by over 7,000,000 users? In my opinion, 7,000,000 people can easily be classed as a crowd and 2,000,000 articles can easily be considered quite a lot of collective work!
The Open Directory Project is another crowdsourced project. It is one of the Word’s largest directories of websites and the moderators are all volunteers who work together. It is much more formal than Wikipedia and not quite as collabrative but once again shows how individual efforts combined can make something great.
Crowdsourcing hasn’t failed, just better business models need to be established on how to use it.
I like the idea of crowd sourcing. I would even visit Cambrian House whenever I could to browse the new ideas.
I think the difference between Cambrian House and “working” crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia is focus. In the example of Wikipedia, all the users are focused on one idea. Their efforts and thoughts are focused. I think Cambrian House would have been more effective if everyone would have voted on one or two ideas at a time and then focused on carrying those two ideas out.. documenting the process along the way.
I hope that crowd sourcing continues on…