What questions do you have about crowdsourcing?

May 13, 2008 7:24 AM

Stanford/MIT Venture Lab (VLAB) is holding a panel discussion at the Stanford Business School on Crowdsourcing -- when companies use the wisdom of crowds to build business value. We're crowdsourcing questions for the event and want to ask for suggestions on what our moderator, Jeff Howe from Wired (who coined the term crowdsourcing) should ask our panel of participants about the topic. What questions would you want to ask a panel of top VCs, company CEOs and journalists involved in the space? What are you most curious about when it comes to crowdsourcing?
posted by japazillian to computers & internet (5 comments total)

AskMetafilter's most popular questions are nearly all ones to do with making lists. Can we conclude that crowds are comparatively poor at generating great convergent solution to a question?
posted by rongorongo at 7:44 AM on May 13, 2008

First question might be about responsibility.
What if the ideas provided by the crowd look good on paper but have unforeseen flaws in practice? Who would be responsible?
Also the question of intellectual property right exists. What would happen if you don't win the "competition" yet the company uses your idea or a significant part of it?

I think it's going to be a really interesting discussion.
posted by defenestratedego at 7:47 AM on May 13, 2008

[removed "come to our event" links and etc. in the question. Please use AskMe for asking questions, not publicizing your stuff, thanks]
posted by jessamyn at 8:02 AM on May 13, 2008

What do the companies see as their corporate social responsibility in crowd-sourcing? Does building business value mean building a community? What if that community is no longer profitable but also not a drain on the company? Should it be supported? Does gathering opinions also mean gathering opinions on under what circumstances people might change their behavior to something more sustainable? Should the crowd-sourced data be available to the government to the public?
posted by ejaned8 at 8:10 AM on May 13, 2008

Yeah, if crowdsourcing is so great, how come Cambrian House failed?

zing!
posted by GuyZero at 9:34 AM on May 13, 2008