Crowdsourcing elevates role of distributed IT governance
Posted by Carlos Bernal on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 @ 10:33 AM
With the release of more than 90,000 government documents related to military operations in Afghanistan making headlines around the globe, from a technology perspective, it's certainly putting the idea of crowdsourcing into the mainstream.
For those who have heard the term but aren't fully versed on it, crowdsourcing is essentially a way to gather the collective knowledge of the public to complete a business related task. It's based on the premise that the experience and intelligence of an interested community will contribute to the greater good of a project. (The folks over at BNet have a really good summary available here.)
The immediate pluses and minuses of crowdsourcing are somewhat obvious in terms of free labor versus you get what you pay for. However, it's not always that black and white as variables such as size and scope of project as well as the pool of experts in the particular field will impact the outcome.
For example, just look at what the open source movement has done for the tech sector in the past 15 years or so and certainly crowdsourcing aims to take a page from that playbook.
One open source project in particular that I find of high interest is the work around the Jazz platform from the folks over at IBM Rational. They're making software development more collaborative through open source.
The crowdsourcing movement has picked up steam of late in the age of Web 2.0 and the sheer volume of people and tools that are connected throughout the world whether it's through Flickr, LinkedIn, dedicated crowdsourcing websites, etc.
The one area that shouldn't be overlooked in crowdsourcing and open source contributions is the role of distributed management and oversight of the projects. It just seems logical that there needs to be some sort of system of checks and balances to assure that contributed content is valuable, constructive and moves the project forward. This doesn't mean that contributors will be evaluated as that's an obvious turn-off to inspiring group brainstorms.
However, if you're making certain aspects of your business and/or software code available to the public, there should be some sort of oversight of the contributions. And it doesn't have to be obvious. In fact, it may be more valuable if it's run in the background and only presents itself when there's a potential contribution of something that doesn't align with the project's mission.
Of course, there are systems in place at most crowdsourcing sites and code reviews conducted with open source initiatives. These systems often track back contributions, confirm registrations, etc. Though as the aperture opens even wider for group collaboration, it calls for a distributed approach to governing the activities.
Before a crowdsourcing project kicks off or contributions are accepted, consider the role of distributed IT governance as a safety net. The IT community is embracing distributed IT governance when it comes to open source so it stands to reason that crowdsourcing also takes a closer look at the mechanisms in place that foster collaboration while cutting through the clutter and accelerating a project's success.