Crowdsourcing: Is it worth it?

I find crowdsourcing a very great concept but in practice I do not know if it works. I am going to use an example that I recently experienced. I have an app called Nextdoor-Neighborhood. This app is a way for community members to keep in contact with each other. There are several things that people can do. Community members can advertise for businesses, sell items, share experiences, and most importantly complain. I was really pumped to get on there and read all of the complaints. Now however, I have discovered that if crowdsourcing was used effectively we could have avoided a huge calamity in our neighborhood. Recently we have had a problem with parking on the streets and the HOA solution was to put up no parking signs. Sounds great right? Wrong! People we so mad! I really think if the HOA would have used crowdsourcing on our neighborhood app they would have had a better way to solve the problem. Instead now they are receiving multiple complaints because now people are seeing the problems. Simple questions to the community would have had several solutions to the parking issue. 
The problem with crowdsourcing is that not all people participate. I am part of the problem here. I did not come up with any solutions until these signs went up either. How do we solve this? I really do not have an answer. How can you make people participate? I think one way is just to make sure people know the whole picture of what could happen. You have to make sure you explain the whole situation and possible outcomes so that people can visually see what issues could come up. Hopefully that will spur people into action. 

Have you guys ever used crowdsourcing before? How did it work? What are some solutions to make it better?

Comments

  1. VanessaJuly 12, 2018 at 7:00 PM

    I'm on Nextdoor, and while my neighborhood is banding together -- revising a dormant neighborhood group, getting newcomers (e.g., the last decade of folks) united and involved -- we have uninvolved people. Several of my neighbors are not on Nextdoor. The flip side is that some folks will never make it to a neighborhood meeting (held on weekday evenings -- not a great time for me). We may need multiple outlets to get people involved if the goal is to represent needs for the whole. However, if we just need some folks to come together and do something (volunteers to clean up the park), an app like Nextdoor might work just fine.

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