The microscopic math of crowdsourcing

“Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call.”

--Wikipedia article, “Crowdsourcing”

To me, the basic theory of crowdsourcing is that if you ask enough people for something, you’re bound to get a response.  Most people may not be interested, but with so many people in the world, you don’t need to hook everybody.  You’re going to get SOMEBODY.

Of course, this attitude risks falling into the Contact trap of just believing that all big numbers are really big.  In this movie, Jodie Foster plays an astronomer searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life, and she delivers this little speech: “There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.”

It’s one of those “Wow, just think about it!” lines.  On the other hand, if you actually do think about it… it’s totally false.  If we take those numbers on their face, we have to divide 400 billion by 1 million to find how many stars have planets.  That’s 400,000.  Pretty big number.  OK, now let’s divide that number by a million again to find how many stars have planets with life.  The answer is 0.4.  Whoops, this isn’t looking so good.  We need to divide by a million again to find out how many stars in the Milky Way are orbited by intelligent life.  That gives us 0.0000004, which is a number even smaller than Pedro Martinez’s career batting average.  It’s effectively zero, really.  We already know there are more planets than that with intelligent life in the galaxy.  As in, at least one.  (That would be Earth, yeah.)

You’d think that, for a film with a $90 million dollar budget, somebody involved would bother to double-check what the difference is between a million, a billion, a quintillion, etc.  But apparently it doesn’t matter, because when you start throwing out really big numbers (larger than, say, 100?) people just tune out.

There are 307 million people in the United States.  So if your crowdsourced campaign reaches one out of every million people, you’ll wind up with a very small pool of people (307).  But if you reach one out every 100,000, then the answer is 3,070, which is roughly comparable to the amount of entries that might be placed into the Doritos crowdsourced ad campaign, Crash theSuperbowl.  There’s not a big rhetorical difference between one-in-a-million and one-in-a-hundred-thousand.  But it’s a big difference in reality.  Offering a large cash prize probably helps bridge the gap.  But one should note that it’s a lot cheaper than it would have cost to buy several thousand video advertisements the traditional way.

If you don’t have a million dollars to wave in front of random civilians, you might not get such a quick response to your crowdsourcing strategies.  On the other hand, free crowdsourcing can succeed as well.  I began this post with Wikipedia’s definition of crowdsourcing, which is a little bit like looking up the word “dictionary” in the dictionary.  Wikipedia’s philosophy of “everybody just write down everything you know, if you want” didn’t start out so great.  A cutting-edge friend of mine actually turned me on to Wikipedia in its infancy around 2002.  And I can say, unequivocally, that it was a useless, inaccurate, sloppy, piece of crap.  But with the entire world tasked to improve it, it’s basically become the main go-to reference for all knowledge… period.  Like a stone washing in the sand, it’s been slowly perfected.  No one is even embarrassed anymore to admit that Wikipedia is where they get all their shit.

If you don’t have a decade of time, or a ton of cash-money prizes, your other option is to simply offer people something they can actually get interested in.  Take for example, these projects that have managed to get funding through a website called Kickstarter.  The idea behind Kickstarter is that, if people are actually interested in your project, they can just straight up give you money.  Like, just give it to you.  And it actually works sometimes!  (Here's your vocab word for this one: "Crowdfunding.")

The world doesn’t owe you a living, but if you actually ask the world, it just might give you one anyway.  But don’t get your "one-in-a-millions" mixed up with your "one-in-a-hundred-thousands."  It can make all the difference.