We are a group of students at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration based in Austria and are currently looking into the topic of innovative communities and how/why they work. We are particularly interested in how fairness/justice affects the success of the cooperation between manufacturer and contributors to the community.

As I have just read this article I recogniced that you all are very engaged in the subject of crowdsourcing. I’ve already contacted Andrew Parker, the autor of this article but I would be also very glad to know your point of view regarding fairness in communities. We especially turn our concentration on the plattforms ponoko.com and crowdspirit.com

In return, we certainly could provide you with our core findings as soon as our study is finished. Every answer would be a great help for our study. If you have any information for us, please do not hesitate to contact me under daniel.winzer@wu-wien.ac.at

Attached there is a list of our questions.

Thanks a lot and greetings from Vienna

1.) What do you think are the key factors of a successful community and how important is fairness/justice?

2.) In recent discussions crowdsourcing communities were called modern sweatshops? Where would you draw the line between the benefits of participation and the risk of being exploited?

3.) Should the operator or the community set up any rules for his community? Or would it be better not to have any binding regulations and to rely on common practices and mutual respect?

4.) What do you think are the key factors that make the decision process objective and fair?

5.) What do you think about the selection of ideas/designs? Should the operator of the platform be the one who makes the final decision or should the community decide about the production?

6.) How important is feedback to the crowdsourcing concept?

7.) Do you think that a plattform should use incentives such money and reward to motivate their users?

8.) Could you think of any rewards and incentives apart from money?

9.) What compensation scheme would you suppose to be most fair for contributors (lump sum or percentage of the turnover (and therefore taking the risk of getting nothing, if nothing is sold)or any others?

10.) What do you think is the entrepreneur’s/platform-operator’s main contribution in the case of crowdsourcing?

11.) Is there any other aspect of justice within communities that we should consider apart from fairness in the decision making process and a fair outcome for contributors?

I don’t think it’s going to be long before we see a mainstream, physical product that has been co-produced by users, becoming a mainstream success of the same magnitude as Firefox.

The future of niche product development is here!

However, I like that fact that viral distribution is baked into any crowdsourced product by definition. By participating in a crowdsourced creation, you are investing time, interest, etc and thus becoming an evangelist on behalf of the product.

But yea, I agree Threadless has benefited from a coolness factor that other crowdsourced sites (like Cambrian House) don’t seem to leverage.