Crowdsourcing

Journalist Jeff Howe, who first identified the trend in a June 2006 Wired article, examines crowdsourcing: handing large numbers of people work that once belonged to a small group of specialists. He presents the crowd as talented and productive as well as wise, and as a meritocracy in which only the quality of the work counts, not age, education or job history. Howe traces the model to programmers who showed that a community of peers could build better products than Microsoft. He asks why Procter & Gamble keeps turning to amateurs for scientific problems and how iStockphoto and Threadless earn millions with tiny staffs, and weighs the disruption the crowd brings to traditional labor.

Bogdana Butnar, head of strategy at Poke, put it on her Ultimate Books to Read list.