Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing".[1][2][3] In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.[4][5][6]
"Crowd work" redirects here. For the performing arts term, see audience participation.Advantages of using crowdsourcing include lowered costs, improved speed, improved quality, increased flexibility, and/or increased scalability of the work, as well as promoting diversity.[7][8] Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation.[8][9][10][11] Some forms of crowdsourcing, such as in "idea competitions" or "innovation contests" provide ways for organizations to learn beyond the "base of minds" provided by their employees (e.g. LEGO Ideas).[12][13] Commercial platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, match microtasks submitted by requesters to workers who perform them. Crowdsourcing is also used by nonprofit organizations to develop common goods, such as Wikipedia.[14]
Definitions[edit]
The term crowdsourcing was coined in 2006 by two editors at Wired, Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, to describe how businesses were using the Internet to "outsource work to the crowd", which quickly led to the portmanteau "crowdsourcing".[15] The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first use: "OED's earliest evidence for crowdsourcing is from 2006, in the writing of J. Howe."[16] The online dictionary Merriam-Webster defines it as: "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers."[17]
Daren C. Brabham defined crowdsourcing as an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model."[18] Kristen L. Guth and Brabham found that the performance of ideas offered in crowdsourcing platforms are affected not only by their quality, but also by the communication among users about the ideas, and presentation in the platform itself.[19]
Despite the multiplicity of definitions for crowdsourcing, one constant has been the broadcasting of problems to the public, and an open call for contributions to help solve the problem. Members of the public submit solutions that are then owned by the entity who originally broadcast the problem. In some cases, the contributor of the solution is compensated monetarily with prizes or public recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be praise or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, from experts, or from small businesses.[15]
