How crowdsourcing is an effective way to build a community
Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technology to gather the collective effort and knowledge from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. A critical challenge for crowdsourcing users and providers is to engage online participants to make big contributions. At first, people that are interested in a single topic are likely to be the most frequent participants. When planners gained trust of the community members, their crowdsourcing efforts will spread amongst their families and friends and others. Growing a crowdsourcing community can be achieved by examining how well connected it is and how this can be enhanced.
Encouraging individuals and groups to raise money for your organization is creating engagement within your community and raising fun, and funds, for your cause. Crowdsourcing projects rely on a community of participants and professionals.
You will need to address the challenge of building and sustaining a trusting relationship with your community, which will include people with many different things to contribute and reasons for participating.Some communities are well-defined and have many things in common, even if their interest in your project focuses on a specific issue, question or concern. Others may be a disconnected group of people who share a common interest, concern or hobby. Find out what motivates your community and why people might want to get involved in your project.
Since communities are different, no one template applies to all. Be sensitive to the particular needs, skills and motivation of the community you’re working with and use appropriate techniques to interact with your partners.
Consider organizational limitations of your participants and how they fit in with agency protocols. Providing tools to guide you in understanding your potential partners and choosing the best ways to make sure everyone gets what they need from the project is vital. Continuously engaging your volunteers to keep them actively connected to your project is also important. Use techniques specifically tailored to your community to make sure the community is participating.
Crowdsourcing is also well suited to do simple tasks that can be done over and over. The challenge often is to find ways for keeping participants engaged. Many classifications of crowdsourcing tasks have been proposed, but for academic and cultural institutions, the tasks may best be organized into four main categories which are transcription, supplementing Metadata, collection Building & Curation and identification & Provenance.
