Crowdsourcing and Gift Economies

Explaining open source is sometimes a little tricky. (Only sometimes though. Honest.) Depending on who I'm talking to I'll explain that working on an open source project is a little bit like volunteering to sing with the church choir. Even if the person isn't religious, they can usually appreciate the beauty of a group that sings in unison. They also understand the more the choir practices together, the better they sound. On more than one occasion this explanation has been the "aha" moment that snaps my life and my business ethics into focus for a friend or a client. The analogy doesn't, however, work when trying to explain crowd sourcing.

I am working on a new project that will offer (free) audio interviews with community "elders." The audio interviews will have transcripts and will need to be translated into multiple languages. I've convinced the project lead to turn to the internets and use crowd sourcing to make these translations happen. On the one hand they may not be perfect, and they may not all happen instantly, on the other hand I think it would be an amazing school project for someone that is learning a second language...to translate part of the audio interview and to help spread the cultural knowledge from one community to another.

The project lead is skeptical about this whole "people will work for free" thing. She's asked me to find some more reading material on crowdsourcing and gift economies to get a better understanding of what it's all about (and why we do it and why it makes perfect business sense). I have to admit that I know it works more based on my gut than because of specific research. I've found the following articles with a quick google search. Do you know of more? Please leave your suggestions in the comments!

• Should your company 'crowdsource' its next project?
• What Is Crowdsourcing?
• The Power of Crowdsourcing Consumer Reviews
• Crowdsourcing in action: mapping violence reports

(Yes, I'm pretty sure this is me crowdsourcing my crowdsourcing research. The irony is not lost on me.)

I also want to open up the real can of worms: licensing. If you were doing this kind of project, how would you license the content on the site? Would you use different licenses for the "primary source" material and the contributed translations?