Crowdsourcing with Clickworker


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Many Americans assume that corporations have perfected the art of exploiting their employees’ diverse wealth of knowledge. In the book The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowieki, disagrees with this assumption. He believes that business have neglected to use this valuable resource of knowledge that their employees could offer, when solving problems (19). The lack of faith in a company’s work pool, to assist in making levelheaded decisions, could be attributed to arrogance, or a dependence on “expert” opinions. Surowieki, also strongly emphases that it’s not the amount of experts an organization has, that makes a difference in decision making. Instead he asserts that, “satisfying the conditions-diversity, independence, and decentralization,” within a group is the corner stone to making lucrative choices (19). I agreed, that collectively within an organization there are people who can contribute to finding a solution or help a company be more profitable, without being experts on the subject matter. Joining a crowdsourcing job web site, called Clickworker.com, and failing miserably to make more than ten cents, I don’t feel it worked in my favor. However, I see how Clickworker benefits from it.
Clickworker, is a website that offers services to companies, that need to complete large or complex projects, inexpensively. This is how it works. First a company places an order for a job. As an example, let’s say an organization want a complete directory of online businesses, compiled into one database. Instead of hiring one person, to research and complete this time consuming and tedious duty, it is dispersed to over 500,000 people around the world to preform the task at hand. In return registered Clickworkers receive a monetary credit for every tas...

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...n the knowledge of people as group. American business and businesses worldwide, in the past neglected this treasure of knowledge hidden in their work force. I feel its safe to say, that corporations are realizing how powerful the engine of crowdsourcing is. I believe the driving force of this engine is powered by facebook.com and twitter.com. Social networking set the pace for how information is shared and gathered and paved the way for sites like Clickworkers, to tap into that crowd. Again, although Clickworker did not work in my favor. That doesn’t mean I can’t find another crowd, to tap into too, that is equally beneficial for me and the website. It may seem in the beginning that diversity and decentralization is unnecessary, however it was necessary to help Clickworkers find the special group of people needed to complete the objective, in order to be profitable.

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