Author: David Alan Grier
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Reviewer: Errol Jayawardene, head of technology and digital at Red Lorry Yellow Lorry
The first thing to consider when reviewing a book called Crowdsourcing For Dummies (and indeed any of the ‘For Dummies’ books) is that as a reviewer you aren’t exactly setting yourself up as an expert! But don’t be fooled, David Alan Grier’s book is both a good starting point for the uninitiated as well as useful reference guide to those who are already part of the crowd.
Crowdsourcing – a means of organising and coordinating labour and people usually via the internet – has become big news with platforms such as Kickstarter helping Ouya (the independent games console maker) raise over £5.6 million. Gier’s book contains plenty of information, whether you’re a marketer planning on using crowdsourcing to get something designed, want to use crowdsourcing to generate ideas or even if you’re thinking of becoming a crowdworker to sell your expertise, it’s full of tips, examples and general advice.
The book devotes most of its pages to taking you through the different forms of crowdsourcing from how to use a crowdcontest to find a new company logo to microtasking so you can divide jobs like business data or desk-based research into easy to digest tasks. One example takes you through a communications firm that’s using macrotasking to assemble teams for new clients to help with task like such graphic design or advertising which they don’t have in-house. The book also acknowledges that not everything is rosy in the crowdsourcing garden and points to downsides such as lack of control and possible problems with reliability of the crowd.
It’s peppered with places to go for additional resources such as www.Crowdsourcing.org for general information and takes you through some of the more popular crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and crowdcontest site 99designs. I found the later chapters particularly useful, including chapter 18 about using crowdsourcing to initiate innovation and chapter 20 which discusses ten (or so) websites to watch.
There are of course niggles, some examples are clearly adapted from US versions and given the fast-paced nature of crowdsourcing it’s easy to see how the book could become dated. It would also have been nice to see more examples of how businesses can promote a crowd project successfully. Overall, I’d say that if you’re after a pure b2b guide to crowdsourcing this book won’t provide all the answers, but if you want a good overall guide, it’s a nice place to start.
Star Rating: 3/5