This past Sunday, the pilot of a 6-passenger turbo prop plane was taking off from Marco Island Florida heading to Mississippi and died during ascent. The plane was carrying four passengers: Doug White, his wife and two teenage daughters. Shortly after take off, White noticed that the pilot had passed out. The plane was on autopilot so there was no immediate danger. White tried for 30 minutes to revive the pilot to no avail. White, a licensed pilot, had 150 hours experience on smaller Cessna aircraft but had never flown a plane as big as the King Air plane.
White radioed air traffic control to explain the problem and in response one of the controllers called a friend, Kari Sorenson, who had King Air flight experience. The air traffic controller relayed the events in the plane to Kari and in return Kari gave step-by-step instructions back to White through the controller. White landed the plane safely and everyone (except for the deceased pilot) was ok all due to the expertise of Sorenson and the resourcefulness of the air traffic controller.
In this case, one opinion or expert was plenty to save the day. Who knows what would have happened if air traffic control was not able to find a King Air expert? What this air traffic controller did was leverage his network to find an expert to contribute their experiences to solve a problem. Sorenson was willing to help because his friend asked. This is a type of crowdsourcing.
There are similar problems that we all run into whereby one opinion is plenty to solve a problem. For instance, if my car broke down on the side of the road, the expertise of my mechanic would be plenty to solve the problem assuming I had one and knew had to get a hold of him. We are starting to see solutions hit the market that can solve this exact problem of connecting experts with those who have a problem in that exact segment. Although this level of expertise might not be needed on regular basis, these solutions will serve to be extremely helpful.
In our daily lives, there are probably far more issues that we run into whereby the aggregated opinions of a larger pool of people matters more. The dilemma at hand often mandates the size and demographic of that pool desired to provide an opinion. For instance, if I want to know the cheapest place to buy gas in Los Gatos, I would only care about the opinions of 30,000 people who live here. At the same time, if I wanted to know the single best crossover SUV less than thirty thousand dollars, then the opinions of 500,000 people would be more appropriate. If I wanted to know the single most popular movie currently playing in theaters then 1,000,000 opinions of people over thirty is probably more appropriate.
You might say, “Gosh, it would be great to have that kind of power.” To which I would say TheCrowd is gathering………….(April 30th)
White radioed air traffic control to explain the problem and in response one of the controllers called a friend, Kari Sorenson, who had King Air flight experience. The air traffic controller relayed the events in the plane to Kari and in return Kari gave step-by-step instructions back to White through the controller. White landed the plane safely and everyone (except for the deceased pilot) was ok all due to the expertise of Sorenson and the resourcefulness of the air traffic controller.
In this case, one opinion or expert was plenty to save the day. Who knows what would have happened if air traffic control was not able to find a King Air expert? What this air traffic controller did was leverage his network to find an expert to contribute their experiences to solve a problem. Sorenson was willing to help because his friend asked. This is a type of crowdsourcing.
There are similar problems that we all run into whereby one opinion is plenty to solve a problem. For instance, if my car broke down on the side of the road, the expertise of my mechanic would be plenty to solve the problem assuming I had one and knew had to get a hold of him. We are starting to see solutions hit the market that can solve this exact problem of connecting experts with those who have a problem in that exact segment. Although this level of expertise might not be needed on regular basis, these solutions will serve to be extremely helpful.
In our daily lives, there are probably far more issues that we run into whereby the aggregated opinions of a larger pool of people matters more. The dilemma at hand often mandates the size and demographic of that pool desired to provide an opinion. For instance, if I want to know the cheapest place to buy gas in Los Gatos, I would only care about the opinions of 30,000 people who live here. At the same time, if I wanted to know the single best crossover SUV less than thirty thousand dollars, then the opinions of 500,000 people would be more appropriate. If I wanted to know the single most popular movie currently playing in theaters then 1,000,000 opinions of people over thirty is probably more appropriate.
You might say, “Gosh, it would be great to have that kind of power.” To which I would say TheCrowd is gathering………….(April 30th)
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