I've been thinking a lot about crowdsourcing and the types of problems where it (and some team-oriented variants of crowdsourcing) could work. In my research, I ran across the story - so far - of the crowdsourcing of solutions to the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf. I say so far since as of this writing the problem is continuing only slightly unabated.
BP didn't post the question of what to do on any of the available crowdsourcing platforms, like Innocentive. It didn't launch a crowdsourcing site of its own for a long time, although it has one now that claims to have over 7800 suggestions. However, BP is not very transparent about what it is doing with the suggestions, as highlighted in this article. Other people have leapt into the breach, providing venues for people to offer suggestions. These included the Guardian newspaper and a site called BPOilnews.com. People also apparently began submitting comments the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Open Government site (since it was open and had "EPA" in the title); eventually the EPA opened another site specifically to deal with the BP situation. The EPA's new site defines the problems it is interested in help with -- which is one advantage of being slightly proactive (even if you are dragged to being proactive by other people).
In a very interesting post, Laurel Papworth notes that the PR advantages of crowdsourcing -- of asking for help and at least pretending to listen -- would have been valuable for BP. Instead, they have taken the route of trying to be the experts and instead looking quite foolish.
The desire of people to help is impressive. Their capacity to help might be very large. It appears that BP is resistant to taking help, although it's admittedly hard to know (lack of response by them, lack of publicity by them of their response doesn't mean they aren't reading what they are getting, but it does make one wonder). It would be nice to see some response, and some evaluation publicly of the ideas that have been received.
What do you think BP should have done? What should it do now to get the most from the public?
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