hyperlocal.org

Sami Vittamäki , a business graduate from the Helsinki School of Economics is working on his Master Thesis and has just released an interesting overview on the structure and semantics of crowdsourcing models. The "FLIRT" model defines three groups and positions them according their activity and involvement rom the core to an inner and an outer ring. The second scale elaborates on the typical elements found in collective collaborative environments: Facilities, Languange, Incentives, Rules and Tools.

I would say, this approach is very much in line with the post of Bradley Horowitz , VP of product strategy at Yahoo! about the three main groups, that can be found on social networks: Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation. As an example take Yahoo! Groups.

• 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
• 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
• 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)