Crowdsourcing: The NBA Draft

The case I chosen is NBA draft case, to be specific, it is how crowdsourcing to a certain degree helped the Sacramento Kings to select a player on draft day in 2014. Before the NBA draft day in 2014, the Sacramento Kings put a “Draft 3.0 Challenge” link on their official website, the purpose the kings did this was to find qualified amateurs who will share their expertise in identifying draft-eligible players for the Kings to consider choosing, the participators were asked to use their own experience and analysis to evaluate NBA draftees, and several participators who have the most insightful analyses would be invited to a Kings Draft Advisory Council to help make a draft pick. Finally, by summarizing the opinion of the picked participators and other experts (like coach of the Kings), the Sacramento Kings selected the player they wanted.

 

Compared with the the Next Stop design case, the NBA draft case has lots of similarities with it, like both of them don’t have entry fee, while as for me, the biggest similarity between these two case is that in both these two cases “enjoyment is a simple, powerful motivator. That is to say, if an activity is fun and gratifies the need for individuals to be entertained and stimulated, …people will be motivated to explore that activity” (Brabham, 2012, 322). For most NBA fans, they want their home team to become better and better, thus suggesting their own teams do something, like trading a certain player or making a certain player plays more time, is one of the actions they always to do. However, no matter they send emails to official email address or comment under the official Twitter/Facebook account, their voice may not be heard or their advise may not be considered. Therefore, when an opportunity appeared that they could truly have a chance to participate in home team’s future building and communicate with the management layer of the team that let them listen to their opinion, they absolutely enjoyed to take part in this activity.

However, in my perspective, the NBA draft case is much more different with the emergency reporting case. For instance, the emergency reporting case could inform and alert other people, that is to say, people who participated in can not only provide information they know, but also can know information from it, while the NBA draft case was just helping the Sacramento Kings itself to make a decision, only the Sacramento Kings knew what people write, participators had no chance know other people’s analyses. In my opinion, it is because the emergency reporting case is like a platform for share, while the NBA draft case is somewhat like a contest because  few of participators have chance to finally help officials to make the decision directly. In addition, because of the same reason I referred above, social media always play a significant role in the emergency case, like people always use hashtag on Twitter to post information which relate to a certain disaster. However, the NBA case didn’t need social media to play such an important role, participators could only use Sacramento Kings’ official website to achieve their participation.