FLIRTing with the Crowds

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This is for the time being the last of my ‘FLIRT model for Crowdsourcing’ posts. If you don’t know anything about the FLIRT, is suggest you start here, and move up through Focus, Language Incentive, Rules and Tools.

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The final ‘element’ in the FLIRT model is the C4, the different groups participating in crowdsourcing. This part is inspired mainly by works of Chris Anderson, Malcom Gladwell and Jakob Nielsen on defining the different groups of online participation, and is founded in addition on scientific research and numerous blog posts. The latest insighful post for me was, just today, this one on ballpark.ch, in which the different roles in participation are discussed. The bottom line: Even with mass participation, it’s not time to kick out the experts; people have different skill and knowledge levels and contribute according to their relevant potential.

Nevertheless, every contribution, be it an original creation or a single vote, is important reaching the fullest potential in crowdsourcing projects. This is why I haven’t arranged the groups in any kind of hierarchy: they are all equally important parts of the whole. I didn’t have a change within this conceptual study to actually study the groups more in depth, and I’m sure that with further studies, more groups and subgroups can be identified. However, I felt the need to contribute the community with how I’ve observed and identified these different participating groups. Comments and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

Creators

Creators are the ones contributing with original ideas/solutions/content, etc. They are naturally driven by extrinsic benefits, such as fame, company and peer recognition, monetary rewards, etc. but equally important is the genuine challenge and the change to make one’s life a little better by participating in the collaborative offer. The creators compete in who submits the winning solution.

The benefits they derive from other participating groups have to do with receiving critique and ideas for their own use from the Critics, gaining exposure via the Connectors, and receiving collective judgment on the value and relevance of their ideas from the Crowds.

Critics

The critics like to be right on issues within a given field that they perceive important to them and are very keen on commenting and critisizing ideas that fit their area of ‘expertise’. Of course, they are not necessarily recognized experts on the field in question, but nevertheless wish to be. They driven by the potential of recognition and authority to be gained by participating in the conversation, and not so much explicit monetary rewards.

The Critics’ key dynamics with the other groups include receiving content and ideas to chew on from the Creators, receiving information on new and relevant issues from the Connectors, and enjoying the status of and being recognized as an expert by the Crowds who can decide to listen or not to listen.

Connectors

The connectors are close to Gladwell’s connectors, in that they are connected and communicate with a large number of people. The difference is that in the online world, they don’t have to know them personally. They can use e-mail or discussion forums to communicate about the stuff they have seen, but ever more often, they use blogs to exert their influence over even larger audience. They are engaged in the conversation through sharing and reporting: they’re not pushing their own opinions or agendas like the critics are, but are instead happy with bringing things into wider knowledge.

The connectors thus take enjoyment mainly in large audience and the feeling of sharing that the Crowds can offer them. The Creators are for them merely a source of content to write about and from Critics they receive opinions and viewpoints on what would be important areas to focus on.

Crowds

Naturally, there’s a large group of us who can’t find the time or the interest to participate as extensively as the other groups. Some people stick to simple tasks, like tagging, rating (1 to 5 stars on YouTube), voting, etc. The Crowds are nevertheless essential in categorizing and making sense of the different contributions of other groups. It is often the Crowds that decide which ideas/solutions/content/designs truly possess potential for wider adoption and thus have commercial value.

Naturally, the Creators provide the Crowds with the content to consume and interact with, whereas the Connectors offer to share with them relevant information on those and other opportunities to entertain themselves with, while the Critics offer their own opinions and insight into the equation.

Key Dynamics of the C4

In the figure below are summarized the key contributions that the different groups offer to each other.

The proportions of participation

Outside of these four groups are the lurkers, or traditional consumers, who do not participate in any way, but instead simply consume the content as it is offered. Traditionally it has been thought that this completely passive group amounts to 90% of the total population. However, as we do know, just buying books on amazon contributes to the wisdom of the system through “people who bought this book, bought also…”. Thus, buying from such service can actually be seen as participation. I strongly argue, that taking into account all forms of participation, also the low-level ones, such as tagging, rating and voting, and passive ones, such as buying and even viewing on systems that track these activities, make them explicit and put them into practical use, participation on crowdsourcing efforts can be anything from some percents to tens of percents. In certain services, it can certainly be the majority, not the minority, that participates. Of course, everyone does this in their own way and not everyone needs to be a creator: crowds also participate.