Posts Tagged ‘crowd sourcing’
Business - Written Monday, June 29, 2009 by Kevin Morris - 7 Comments
LinkedIn’s Crowdsourcing Dilemma
A NY Times article published yesterday covered the story of LinkedIn‘s plan to use crowdsourcing to translate their site to languages other than the already-available English, German, French and Spanish. According to the article, a survey was sent to thousands of professionals in the LinkedIn network to gauge their opinions about providing their services to translate the site.
Here’s a chart showing the responses to LinkedIn’s survey question regarding incentives:
“What type of incentive would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?”
Source: http://linkedin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/graph21.jpg?w=502&h=321
The concept of using crowdsourcing to translate content is not new. Facebook, Mozilla and TED have used similar strategies. Ming wrote about Facebook’s translation initiative here.
When first looking at LinkedIn’s effort to utilize crowdsourcing, it appears as though they’ve made the right moves. They engaged their audience, asked for opinions with a survey and acknowledged the importance of incentives when looking to users to make contributions.
There is an interesting factor at play here, though. LinkedIn is known as a professional network. And given that LinkedIn serves this professional purpose, it’s worthy to note that direct financial compensation was left out of the possible responses for the survey question shown above. Continue…
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