Crowdsourcing 101 / ABC Townsville
Can you really get someone to walk your dog for free? was the question that kicked off this chat with Micheal Clarke of ABC Townsville. It all started with a media release from DogShare that got Michael to ask “what is crowdsourcing and is it here to stay?”.
Crowdsourcing in Australia is a $10 billion industry sector growing to $335 billion by 2020, so I guess it’s here to stay and is often also known as the sharing economy, peer to peer and the collaborative economy.
In its purest form it is a digital marketplace that allows those that have to share, rent or offer to those that want. Some of its largest brands are Uber, Airbnb, Facebook and Alibaba all multi billion dollar global giants who do not own any physical assets in their chosen category, but instead make their money and reputation by connecting those that do own it, with those that want it.
This speaks to a new era where experience is more important than ownership, where business no longer has to have and own everything and where collaborations, joint ventures, partnerships and sharing are part of doing business and living life.
Have a listen now (8 mins 38 secs) and then add your favourite crowd sharing site or example to the growing list
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is crowdsourcing and what has it actually delivered beyond the hype?
Crowdsourcing — using the distributed knowledge, skills, and effort of large groups to accomplish tasks previously done by small expert teams — has delivered genuine results in specific domains: Wikipedia is the most successful crowdsourced knowledge project in history, demonstrating that distributed contribution with governance structures can produce reference-quality content at scale; open source software (Linux, Apache, Firefox, Python) has demonstrated that crowdsourced code development can produce enterprise-grade infrastructure; citizen science projects (SETI@home, Galaxy Zoo, FoldIt) have made genuine research contributions by engaging non-expert contributors in well-defined tasks; and crowdfunding platforms (Kickstarter, Indiegogo) have democratised product development funding for small creators. The crowdsourcing projects that have worked share common features: clear contribution interfaces, quality governance, meaningful participation, and tasks that genuinely benefit from distributed input.
Q: What does crowdsourcing reveal about the changing nature of expertise and who gets to contribute to decisions?
Crowdsourcing challenges the gatekeeping function of expertise in instructive ways: many problems that organisations treat as requiring specialist expertise are actually well-served by distributed non-expert input — customer feedback, user experience testing, pattern recognition in large datasets, translation, and creative ideation all benefit from breadth over depth; but crowdsourcing has limits that its boosters understate — complex technical problems, high-stakes decisions, and tasks requiring integrated judgment rather than distributed input are genuinely better served by expertise; and the governance of crowdsourced systems (how contributions are evaluated, how conflicts are resolved, how quality is maintained) requires significant ongoing expert attention even when the contributions themselves are non-expert. The lesson is not that expertise is obsolete but that the range of contributors whose knowledge is relevant to good decisions is wider than traditional organisations acknowledged.
Q: What are the most significant crowdsourcing applications emerging in 2026?
The significant crowdsourcing applications in 2026 include: AI training data generation — the human labelling and feedback that trains AI models is increasingly crowdsourced through platforms like Scale AI and Amazon Mechanical Turk, making human crowdsourcing a critical input to AI development; participatory urban planning platforms where residents contribute local knowledge to infrastructure decisions; and the intersection of crowdsourcing and AI where AI systems synthesise crowdsourced input that would previously require human aggregation. The most interesting development is the emergence of AI agents as crowdsourcing participants — the question of whether AI-generated contributions to crowdsourced systems should be disclosed and how they change the dynamics of collective intelligence is unresolved and consequential.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a collective intelligence, innovation, or organisational futures keynote?
Contact the team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
Can you really get someone to walk your dog for free? was the question that kicked off this chat with Micheal Clarke of ABC Townsville. It all started with a media release from DogShare that got Michael to ask "what is crowdsourcing and is it here to stay?". Crowdsourcing in Aust.
When signals like Crowdsourcing 101 / ABC Townsville emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Crowdsourcing 101 / ABC Townsville will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
