Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the public delegation of open source code or software from internal employees or associates to third party developers and programmers.
Contents
Overview
Crowdsourcing is an innovative, powerful method in accomplishing many technological tasks and benchmarks with relative ease. The release of open source code under free software licensing systems has allowed third party programmers to manipulate, revise, and innovate new applications for Linux and Android Operating Systems and Android mobile markets. In particular, the open sourcing of Android's operating system lets programmers and developers tweak and make changes to Android's specifications.
Popular Crowdsourcing Successes and Failures
Crowdsourcing has been successful in companies you may have heard of such as Quora Search Engine, Twitter Threadless Tees, Netflix, and Google among others. Unfortunately, crowdsourcing has had its failures as well. GAP Clothing's logo change was crowdsourced for public opinion and feedback that caused GAP to make certain decisions leading to the collapse of the company's financial structure and well-being.
Ethical Conflicts in Crowdsourcing
While the community of developers working on open source projects has produced successes such as Google Android's growing share in the mobile market, Netflix, and Quora, the conflict of ownership and patenting will become more of a problem. For example, the Android OS's ability to hold multi-core processors allows for advanced program capability, storage, and availability. If a developer were to enhance the processing ability of Android 2.2, would Google have a patented share or would the developer have full control and ownership? Third-party developers are beginning to wonder though whether or not their programs and applications will be unique and owned by the creator, or if Google will authorize a policy in which they can patent or control a share of all profits from third party development of Android Operating System programs and applications. Another problem arises if a developer creates an application or program that improves upon the original open source code he or she obtained publicly. If the developer receives praise and profits from ameliorating another programmer's open source code, is he inclined or forced to acknowledge the original developer's contributions?
Another inherent problem in crowdsourcing is the lack of accountability. If everyone is in charge, no one is responsible for their actions. This causes uncertainty and leaves users’ projects and creations to subjective and misguided errors. For example, what if someone created several fake accounts and purposely tried to give great feedback to irrelevant links or intentionally answer questions incorrectly on Quora? They could do this to humor themselves, or maybe they had an agenda in mind because they were pro-Google and against Quora for any arbitrary reason. If there were no checks and balances in place to correct these errors, crowdsourcing could hurt a company or website more than it could help.
