FLIRTing with the Crowds

Well functioning crowdsourcing communities always rely on clear, explicit, and shared rules to deliver an experience that is productive, fun, easy to comprehend for all parties involved, as well safe for everybody to engage in. Rules direct action in the collaborative effort and work as ‘the book of laws’ in disputes. It is necessary to establish these rules well ahead, for if an issue with e.g. appropriateness of submitted content arises, a point to refer to is necessary to lessen feelings for the customer of being treated unfairly (and sharing this feeling with the world on his/her blog). The Rules of any crowdsourcing effort include:

Rules of initiation in the community

Rules of initiation dictate who gets to participate and how do those that do enter the process. As already stated, although crowdsourcing efforts are usually as open as possible, on some occasions it might be useful to limit the number or characteristics of the participants somehow. The basis for this screening should be visible to visitors before they attempt to get initiated, so that wasteful efforts to participate, causing frustration and negative feelings towards a brand, are eliminated. Clearly, limited access can also be used as a marketing tool, creating buzz around the service. In this setting, vain attempts to participate: “lurking at the gates”, serve the purpose of creating desirability around the service well.

Even if the community is open to all, registration will at some point be necessary, for customer information and behavior is best collected this way. Here we must answer questions such as:

• At what stage is registration required?
  • It is usually better to allow some basic usage (such as viewing) of the service without registration to lure in users and require registrating only when more advanced features (such as rating) are needed
• How much information is mandatory for registration?
  • It is usually better to ask for only very basic information when registrating in order to make easy and fast for the customer. Once registered, the customer should be driven to expand his/her profile through small incentives
• What information will be visible to outsiders?
  • Also the question of what information will be shown to other members of the community must be answered. Of course, it’s best to let the users choose what they want to show and what not, but keep it easy and manageable. When children are involved, it might be necessary / mandatory to limit the information shown on page (addresses, phone numbers etc.) because of predators

Rules of creation

Rules must also be established for desired input.

• The format, extent, dimensions, etc. can be dictated by physical manufacturing constraints (such as mandatory use of a ready template, size of design, max. number of colors in design on Threadless)
• Also arbitrary rules can be used to spur creativity (Design Within Reach’s Champagne Chair competition)
• Deadlines, acceptance and evaluation criteria, should also be well communicated

Rules of exchange & interaction

Crowdsourcing activities are in many occasions open-to-all type collaboration, for which reason it is impossible to prohibit people having views hostile towards the company entering the community. Proactive measures dealing with unwanted behavior is needed for effectively managing these types of people. Clear rules on what is allowed and what isn’t helps when needing to decide on banning content, comments, articles, etc. made by misbehaving members. It is however important to note that banning all critical commenting is sure to spark criticism regarding censorship which is a definite no-no in social media. At worst, it will simply turn the participants away and you will never even know why they left. It is well founded to curb non-constructive, offensive and by general standards inappropriate material, but other commenting positive or negative should be allowed.

One important issue is also, how are people allowed to build on each other’s ideas and how the rewards will in this case be divided between contributors. Research shows that building on others’ ideas increases the volume and quality of end results, but the clear incentive schemes are hard to devise for such collaboration.

— Examples

Digg faced a serious situation recently, after one of its members posted a news item containing directions to break the encryption on HD-DVDs. Faced with a threat of a lawsuit from AACS (the owner of the encryption technology), Digg took down the post and after a few re-postings, banned the poster. This led to other members starting to back the original poster and start posting the very same item time and time again digging it ferociously, so that at one point all news items on the Digg front page were pointing towards the same article. Digg tried explaining to its community that it couldn’t survive a lawsuit against the patent holder and pointed the users to its terms of use, but at this point the riot had already gotten out of hand, people were enreaged and servers were crashing. In the end Digg founder Alex Rose posted a response telling the people that they had been listened to and Digg no longer tries to take down the post. In this case the feelings of the community towards the subject of the post were so strong that even referring to clearly stated rules of the game didn’t help but it helped to make Digg’s stance very clear having the rules in the first place.

Furthermore, especially the recent death threats directed towards superstar blogger Kathy Sierra and ongoing child porn investigation going on in Second Life have raised to awareness the issue of anonymity and the commitment of certain community services to protect the identity of their members no matter the issue. Although these are extreme examples, the issue is a real one and shouldn’t go without consideration.