Crowd-sourcing good for ideas, but not for design —
Fiat Brazil is crowd-sourcing ideas for the design of their next car. Their operative question is "In the future we are building, what should a car have for me to call my own and still be good for others?" This is a very good question, as it brings to the fore the competing priorities of individualism and social responsibility.
But it is too easy to read too much into this campaign, which will ultimately lift the profile of Fiat. The public are not designing a new car, they are merely making a flood of suggestions. There is a vast leap between crowd-sourcing ideas and actually designing the features. The former is certainly inviting, but the latter will require politicking.
Crowd-sourcing is not enough. Following up with a transparent deliberative process to synthesise the mess of incompatible ideas that will bubble to the top.
HT to Craig Thomler.
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Maybe another way to look at it is that crowdsourcing is good at the generative part, whereas for things like policy making we need something else (e.g. deliberation) for integration into one whole.
Posted by Tim 17 September 2009 04:11 am | link