Recent posts by BBH-Labs and Edward Boches have inspired a few thoughts in me regarding crowdsourcing. The below items were posted originally in comments but I wanted to share them here as well.
1) Crowdsourcing will only help us if we can prune that crowd. I think this is essentially the model that Victors & Spoils is trying to take.
2) You’ll see that the work going into your efforts are high at the left and right ends of this chart. It is first hard to collect a decent number of qualified members of your “crowd.” Once you do, and the project becomes more widely known of, your work becomes harder because you must sift through a higher volume of submissions. There is a perfect number that varies from project to project.
3) The quality of output degrades when the crowd swells to be too large. A broader pool of people brings a greater range of talent and skills, but the problem with having too many is that the most skilled will get overlooked or lost by the sheer mathematics of this equation.