Chris Grams

Hi ruth-- I'm not sure I'm making it out to be a choice. I view it more as a spectrum or a map, plotting different projects based on how efficient their design is in terms of work/benefit.

What's becoming clear to me is that there are some efforts that call themselves "crowdsourcing" that have much in common with the open source way (many beneficiaries, etc.), and some that call themselves open source, but are actually more like crowdsourcing. So the words and the design don't always match.

Without getting lost in the semantics, the big concept I'm interested in here is system design/efficiency. I'll save for another day the cultural/community differences between crowdsourcing and open source, which I also think are pretty important.

my view? it is absolutely about efficiency. 99designs (and other sites like it) have three beneficiaries (client, winning designer, and 99designs) and 100s of designers who do work but receive no benefit (unless they value experience and the other things you pointed out in your original comment). Wasted work = inefficiency.

There are lots of inefficient systems out there in the world (most governments are pretty good examples) that survive and even prosper despite their design flaws.

As far as how they change... I'm not sure they need to as long as they make a good living doing what they are doing and there are people who don't mind doing work for the chance at something. As Burney pointed out in his post, it's really just a contest/competition at that point.

Stefan's comment below is one I agree with-- I'm not suggesting that crowdsourcing is evil-- it does result in great innovation in many cases. Both systems are better than a lot of traditional approaches to innovation.

I'm suggesting that it is less efficient than the open source way, and I'm wondering if there are some ways to make it better.

hope that helps!