creation of works whose scope comfortably exceeds anything that an individual or small group of dedicated professionals could produce.[1] Crowdsourcing can be viewed as a force multiplier: companies and other entities can sometimes get far more work done by opening their projects to collaborative input than they could have accomplished solely through the efforts of their own employees.[2]
Certain types of works lend themselves more easily to crowdsourced production than others. The world still awaits the first peer-produced hit song, blockbuster film, or acclaimed novel. Nevertheless, the crowdsourced approach has proved its value in the creation of an informational commons: a wide variety of informational goods have been created through the internet-mediated efforts of a distributed community of volunteers.[3] The success of peer-production projects in the information economy necessarily raises the question whether an archetypal informational good—the library—might be created through similar means.
B. Crowdsourced Library-Building
The Library of Congress presently holds a collection of nine billion texts that exist in paper-only form.[4] The National Archives has estimated that, by working steadily at an expected pace of 500,000 texts a year, it can digitize those nine billion paper records in 1,800 years.[5] The figure is, one suspects, purposefully outlandish; it is difficult to imagine any human endeavor (outside, perhaps, the realm of religion) that can be sustained over such a gulf of time. If the numerator—the number of texts to be digitized—cannot be changed, perhaps we can focus on the denominator—the number of texts digitized per year. If the National Archives, working alone, can digitize half a million texts a year, then perhaps it should not work alone. Enlarging the pool of contributors who are working to digitize
- ↑ See Weber, supra note 73, at 59 (noting complexities of software development process that tend to place relatively inflexible limits on what can be accomplished by one or two programmers).
- ↑ The entry for “crowdsourcing” in the Wikipedia encyclopedia includes an interesting list of crowdsourced projects involving a wide variety of private and public entities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing (last visited Jan. 5, 2010).
- ↑ See Armstrong, supra note 76, at 361 (collecting examples).
- ↑ See Hafner, supra note 3.
- ↑ See id.
Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (2008); Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008); Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006).
