Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and Outsourcing for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.
For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).
The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.
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The word was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article.[2] Projects which make use of group intelligence, such as the LazyWeb or the ESP Game, predate that word coinage by several years. Recently, the Internet has been used to publicize and manage crowdsourcing projects.
Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.[3] Jeff Howe also went so far as to break down the model of crowdsourcing and discuss the 4 umbrella strategies that exist of it, crowdfunding, crowdcreation, crowdvoting and crowdwisdom, this in turn giving crowdsourcing a broader definition.
Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include the following:
The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis.[5] Other differences between open source and crowdsourced production relate to the motivations of individuals to participate.[5][6]
Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use.[5] Urban and transit planning are prime areas for crowdsourcing.[7] One project to test crowdsourcing's public participation process for transit planning in Salt Lake City has been underway from 2008 to 2009, funded by a U.S. Federal Transit Administration grant.[8] Another notable application of crowdsourcing to government problem solving is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.[9]
In a Leah DeVun interview of Andrea Grover, DeVun asks Grover if web-based collaborative projects tend to be different from face-to-face projects. Grover states that individuals tend to be more open because they are not being physically judged or scrutinized.[10] This ultimately allows for well-designed artistic projects because individuals are less conscious, or maybe even less aware, of scrutiny towards their work. In an online atmosphere there is more attention being given to the project rather than communication with other individuals.
An important example of web-based crowdsourcing, mentioned also in Howe's original book, is social bookmarking (also called collaborative tagging). In social bookmarking systems, users assign tags to resources shared with other users, which given rise to a type of information organisation that emerges from this crowdsourcing process. Recent research [11] has shown that consensus around stable distributions and a simple form of shared vocabularies does indeed emerge in such systems, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary.
"Collaboratition" is a neologism to describe a type of crowdsourcing used for problems that require a collaborative or cooperative effort to be successful, but use competition as a motivator for participation or performance. A good example of collaboratition is the 2009 DARPA experiment in crowdsourcing. DARPA placed 10 balloon markers across the United States and challenged teams to compete to be the first to report the location of all the balloons. Collaboration of efforts was required to complete the challenge quickly and in addition to the competitive motivation of the contest as a whole, the winning team (MIT, in less than seven hours) established its own "collaborapetitive" environment to generate participation in their team.[12]
Another form of collaboration can be found in the term of crowdfunding, inspired from crowdsourcing. Crowdfunding collaboration takes on a different role, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network pooling their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns. What is most interesting about this form of collaboration is the company Age of Stupid is perhaps the most publicized and successful case to-date as they collaborated with the two innovative business models crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. This documentary project on global warming has raised over $1.2 million via crowd funding, and also used crowd sourcing to distribute and exhibit it around the world.[13]
The Internettunnel in Leidschendam/Netherlands by Zwarts & Jansma Architects and artist Hans Muller is an early example of crowdsourcing. Opened in 1998, people could feed the LED-display via the Internet with their own texts. Also, words could be blocked for a certain time. The public became its own dynamic filter, preventing, for example, racist remarks.
The ethical, social, and economic implications of crowdsourcing are subject to wide debate. For example, author and media critic Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview published in Wired News, expressed ambivalence about the term and its implications.[14] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is also a vocal critic of the term.[15]
Some reports have focused on the negative effects of crowdsourcing on business owners, particularly in regard to how a crowdsourced project can sometimes end up costing a business more than a traditionally outsourced project.
Some possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing include the following:
Though some critics believe crowdsourcing exploits or abuses individuals for their labor, studies into the motivations of crowds have not yet shown that crowds feel exploited. On the contrary, many individuals in the crowd experience significant benefits from their participation in crowdsourcing applications.[17][18][19][20] Further authors discuss both risks and rewards of using crowdsourcing as a means of balancing global inequalities [21]
In Leah DeVun's interview of Andrea Grover the question, "Do you think that crowdsourcing removes an economic barrier that might prevent people from participating in art?" Grover's reply was yes. Grover went on to explain that crowdsourcing was originally based on economics. It was designed for businesses to be cost-efficient and lower their expenditures.[22]
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