Beyond the Human-Computation Metaphor

Two assumptions have become dominant in the field of social computing and crowd sourcing - the computational view, and the assumption of a human-only crowd. In this paper, I address those assumptions. I trace their origin in the human-computation metaphor, and argue that while this metaphor is instrumental in facilitating novel developments, it also constrains the thinking of designers. I discuss some of the limitations this metaphor might impose, and offer that additional perspectives, such as an organizational design perspective and the distributed cognition perspective can help us think of novel possibilities of organizing work with crowd sourcing. I call for extending the conversation among computer-scientists and organizational researchers, and propose that the metaphor of ´information processing´ might serve as a ´boundary-object´ around which the dialogue among these communities can thrive.