When outsourcing | crowdsource went full-throttle?
As a content-creation expert who has progressively grown on the job for more than 30 years, the crowd-sourcing culture in her eyes was only a loss for any proper market player. Statement updated in 2023.
Do read on…the following was my opinion piece made nearly a decade ago.
The advantages are many, for someone who has not invested enough time, dollars, and passion into the business, career, and talent as there is nothing to lose.
Crowd-sourcing is fancy to new people who may now act as employers or business people who are given the authority to call the shots. Can call on large crowds through facilitating online market-places, to apply to a job/project who cannot even be verified as genuine, leaving alone the offer they make ranging from as low as $1 to $25 an hour. My experience in observing marketplaces like this, tells me many of them lack the know-how to differentiate between a novice or amateur, or an experienced professional’s work. It is indeed a fancy to many a novice or amateur who can now think they can compete side-by-side with professional work with no background or passion (for instance in design or art or any skill). This is exciting to any aspirant who is free to use this as a testing ground but little do they realize they are placing the few (who are much invested in) they want to compete with in gamble in this world with nothing to lose.
I don’t point my fingers at genuine players. But some ingenuity gets lost when they give into this system thinking they must resort to survival. But unfortunately, such practices put everyone in the same pool. This ball keeps rolling also because some people/crowds offer jobs and agree to sell themselves too low. Falling prey to this by believing that micro-business in this case may also work, those who have spent years investing in their jobs have also lost it all. Dignity, fair Earnings, and Integrity because they could get looked upon along with a few novice providers who are notorious for just copying ideas or lifting off an existing logo and submitting it to job posts as samples. Even Genuine buyers if not cautious could land up in expensive lawsuits if they get to approve an already existing logo submitted by a provider as his or her creation for that job.
I have many examples from experience at the tip of my fingers to refer from. Where we as providers are demanded to provide way too low.
Online platforms which facilitate this market culture have no systems in place to identify the authenticity of a buyer or service provider. In such a platform a 13-year-old whose work culture may only be forming and a 31-year-old who may be at the peak of his/her career is placed under the same radar. The maximum type of assessment offered are online aptitude tests which even a 9-year-old can top these days. Bookish knowledge is placed on par with experience. What is the best answer? You decide.
Would you call crowd-sourcing a fancy or flimsy world? This is my take! What is yours?
Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed by Remy Francis, first published dated 27 December 2014, on LinkedIn, titled “The Fancy World of Crowdsourcing”. The opinion aired is from her personal experiences living and working on 3 continents over a period of 30 years.
