The Crowdsourcing numbers game.

There seems to be a sense of pride for some platforms when they announce the stats of their community.

One contest actually boasted that it had over 15,000 logo ideas. The reality is, in this case, that they really had less than 10 that had any merit (as determined by there professional curators and client). So what’s the point of talking about your “big” numbers? Does it attract clients?

If big numbers attracts more clients it may just start to scare away your crowd. Participants often invest many hours in a crowdsourced project. The more participants, the less chance of a payday. It’s simple arithmetic. 

The bigger the open crowd the more cognitive debris.

If you invite anyone to the party and don’t check their bags at the door be prepared for a very big clean up when it's all over.

I’ve witnessed and participated in the Human Rights Logo competition which claims to have gathered over 15,000 entries. As sincere as some of the submissions were, many other submitters simply gamed the system, “borrowed” ideas, or used the forum to express their negative world views.

Months of infighting, self-serving critiques and non-sensical submissions yielded little in the way of innovative design. Crowdsourcing this task was probably not the best approach: it would appear that some entities decide to “crowdsource” without developing a system of checks and balances to get the most positive work out of their community.  Crowdsourcing does not work without real crowd management. 

"Where good ideas come from.... [Steve Johnson]"

The Co-creation Bandwagon is in town

Let’s just co-create everything. Open our arms to the community and embrace ideas from the masses. It may sound noble and courageous, but we need to be careful when inviting the "community" to participate in creative endeavors just because they can. The democratization of everything can lead to nothing: When you add up all the opposing opinions, similar positions and various ideas of individuals in a community it becomes a homogenizing force and can produce some very boring results. True co-creation takes a lot more effort than a simple invitation to participate and needs to be curated by those that have vision.