Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

We can now turn massive aggregations of small contributions into things of lasting value. This fact, key to our current era, has been a persistent surprise. At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile.

Andrew Lin, in his phenomenal book “The Wikipedia Revolution,” called that moment “Wikipedia’s magic,” the rare time when “the “socio-psychological” reward of interacting with others, and the “hedonic” personal gratification of the task” come together. And that, in essence, is why peer production can be so much more efficient at allocating creative... See more