Crowdsourcing a Taxonomy: Useful or Useless?
January 18, 2012
We vote for useless.
However, the TopCoder blog recently shared an article that breaks down Crowdsourcing into four categories and combines real world examples within the defined taxonomy they are offering. The post is called “Why the Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Can Not Categorize Software Development.”
According to the article, there has been a push to categorize what Crowdsourcing is which can be a good thing. However, the blog found that for software developers like TopCoder this can be very difficult to do.
The article states:
As we read through the aforementioned crowdsourcing.org article, it struck us that a taxonomy such as this would have a very hard time categorizing what TopCoder accomplishes. You may or may not know what we do. Through our global competitive community of more than 321,000 professionals – we don’t often use the term crowd – we create innovative software, algorithms that optimize business and scientific solutions and graphical digital assets. The further we studied the 4 different categories presented by Crowdsourcing.org, the more we realized that TopCoder competitions fit into all four categories presented.
If TopCoder feels this way, we wonder if other companies will find crowdsourcing a taxonomy to be a flop as well. There are useless taxonomies which do little to assist findability. Then there are ANSI standard taxonomies which work just for folks who understand Boolean, take care to formulate search strategies, and enjoy “real” research. Most of the world prefers the “slap in a word” or “take what the service delivers” approach. Sigh.
Jasmine Ashton, January 18, 2012
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