Crowdsourcing is a technique for gathering information, ideas, services, or content by asking for contributions from a large number of individuals, usually through the Internet. It entails a large number of dispersed players giving or generating goods or services—such as ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for compensation or as volunteers.
The term is a mix of “crowd” and “outsourcing,” implying that work previously performed by a single person or small group is disseminated to a broader, frequently diverse, and often anonymous crowd.
Contemporary crowdsourcing frequently employs digital platforms to recruit and distribute work among participants in order to obtain a cumulative outcome. Crowdsourcing is not restricted to online activity, and there are numerous historical examples of it. The term crowdsourcing is a combination of the words “crowd” and “outsourcing”. Crowdsourcing, unlike outsourcing, typically incorporates broader and more public groups of participants.
Crowdsourcing has several advantages, including reduced prices, improved speed, higher quality, increased flexibility and/or scalability of the task, and promoting diversity.
There are various types of crowdsourcing, including:
- Idea Crowdsourcing: Involves collecting suggestions and solutions from a large group of people to generate ideas for a particular problem or challenge.
- Data Crowdsourcing: Involves obtaining data from a large number of contributors. This could include tasks such as data collection, data verification, or data analysis.
- Crowdfunding: A form of crowdsourcing where individuals or organizations seek financial support for a project or idea from a large number of people, usually via online platforms.
- Crowdtesting: Involves outsourcing the testing of software or products to a large group of users or testers.
- Citizen Science: Enlists the help of volunteers from the public to participate in scientific research or data collection.
Commercial services, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, match microtasks given by requesters with workers who do them. Nonprofit organizations employ crowdsourcing to create shared goods, such as Wikipedia.
Crowdsourcing has grown in popularity as the internet has made communication and collaboration easier. It can lead to new insights, creativity, and the ability to tap into a huge group’s collective intelligence. However, problems such as quality control, handling conflicting perspectives, and guaranteeing appropriate remuneration in specific circumstances must be considered when adopting crowdsourcing efforts.
