[Here's the second response in this month's Lab Book Club. We're reading Crowdsourcing by Wired writer Jeff Howe; Rosita Boland from The Irish Times responds below to chapters 4 through 7. See here for more about the Lab Book Club. —Ed.]

Something I thought about throughout this section was: Does an international perspective make a difference in how you look at crowdsourcing as a journalism tool? And if so, what are those differences?

Jeff Howe is American, writing about crowdsourcing in a country with a population of 300 million. My home country, the Republic of Ireland, has a population of four million. Is crowdsourcing about finding your community, no matter whether it ends up being large or small? Or how much does it have to do with the pool of people you start off with? And do different cultures respond differently to crowdsourcing, or are there key common themes no matter where in the world you may be?

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