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Raleigh, NC
Rebecca Fernandez is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, leading projects to help the company scale its open culture. She's an Open Organization Ambassador, contributed to The Open Organization book, and maintains the Open Decision Framework. She is interested in the intersection of open source principles and practices, and how they can transform organizations for the better.
Authored Comments
When I think of crowdsourcing, I picture someone presenting a problem or need to a "crowd" of people who are independent of the organization. These individuals work independently and return with a huge number of suggestions or ideas or solutions, which are then handed back to the original problem-poser. He sifts through them and pulls out the best ideas and then implements one or more of them.
Collaboration, on the other hand, would be folks working together to solve a problem. Typical modes would include brainstorming, team sessions, task delegation, etc. It's marked by cooperative work, rather than independence.
Of course there is a spectrum; a crowdsourcing contributor might actually be two people working together, and when collaborating in a typical environment, some folks will bring independent work to the table.
But my point is that, according to some research, neither model is the ideal working environment for solving problems or building ideas. What's ideal is (1) presentation of the problem, (2) independent work on the problem (and idea generation), and (3) regrouping to collaborate on the shared ideas.
And in my experience, projects are very, very rarely approached that way. Typically it begins with a brainstorming session and then independent thought or work... or a crowdsourcing initiative followed by idea-sifting.
Looks like PJ updated the post to include the full text of her article on how to deal with trolls. Creative Commons licensed, too.
Hope to see this incorporated into the Open Source Way book ASAP.