Jeff Howe

On June 26, the Digital October center hosted a lecture by Jeff Howe, a contributing editor for Wired magazine and the writer of the book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.

Jeff Howe has been a journalist for more than 15 years. He has written for the magazines Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Mother Jones and The Washington Post newspaper. Howe has traveled around the world working on stories ranging from the impending water crisis in Central Asia to the implications of gene patenting, and in the first decade of this century he became interested in the possibilities of collective creative action by large numbers of different people.

In June 2006, he published the article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” in Wired magazine, in which he was the first person in the world to use the term “crowdsourcing.” In this article, Howe described the phenomenon of people coming together to solve problems without, or with very little, remuneration and the effects of the development of such groups for companies that are solving analogous professional tasks. He continued to study this phenomenon and describe it on his blog, crowdsourcing.com. In a few years, Jeff Howe brought together his thoughts and observations in the book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Here is what he says about crowdsourcing now: 

In his lecture, Jeff Howe talked about the phenomenon of crowdsourcing: its background, appearances, developments, and existing forms. The basic theme of the lecture was the use of internal crowdsourcing in companies, that was, attracting enthusiasts for solving problems not from outside, but from the company’s staff. He believes that employers often do not realize what their employees are capable of and how many ideas and solutions they could suggest if only given the possibility. Howe also shared with his listeners his experience in uncovering such potential inside a company and described instruments that are necessary for so doing.