Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data. A neologism (Greek νεολογισμός [neologismos], from νέος [neos] new + λόγος [logos] word, speech, discourse + suffix -ισμός [-ismos] -ism) is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (coined) — often to apply to new concepts, to synthesize pre-existing concepts, or to make older terminology sound more contemporary. ... A contractor is a legal term for one who enters into a binding agreement to perform a certain service or provide a certain product in exchange for valuable consideration, monetary, goods,services, even barter arrangements. ... Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s and refers to the delegation of non-core operations from internal production to an external entity specializing in the management of that operation. ...

History

The word was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June, 2006 Wired Magazine article^[1]. Though the term is new there are examples of significant crowdsourcing projects as early as the eighteenth century. In 1714, the British Government offered a public prize for a solution to the longitude problem. In the 1800s, the Oxford English Dictionary was written from volunteer contributions of millions of slips of paper. Recently, the Internet has been used to publicize and manage crowdsourcing projects. Wired is a full-color monthly magazine and on-line periodical published in San Francisco, California since March 1993. ... The longitude prize was a prize offered by the British government through an Act of Parliament in 1714 for the precise determination of a ships longitude. ... The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), and is the most successful dictionary of the English language, (not to be confused with the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, formerly New Oxford Dictionary of English, of...

Overview

In some cases the labor is well-compensated. 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 small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization. ^[2] Look up kudos in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The word amateur has at least two connotations. ... For other uses, see Volunteer (disambiguation). ...

Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include:

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost.
• Payment is by results.
• The organization can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organisation.

The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to the public, rather than another 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.^[3]

Recent examples of crowdsourcing

• One example is Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia edited by volunteers. The English Wikipedia currently contains over 2,000,000 articles.
• InnoCentive, started in 2002, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive, one of the largest commercial examples of crowdsourcing, provides connection and relationship management services between "Seekers" and "Solvers." Seekers are the companies conducting R&D, searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 125,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone, anywhere, with interest and internet access can become a InnoCentive Solver member. Solvers whose solutions are selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive, which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to target solutions from InnoCentive's Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social initiatives.^[4]
• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing "machine".
• Stardust@Home is an ongoing project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer "clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.
• Cambrian House applies a crowdsourcing model to identify and develop software and web-based businesses. Using a simple voting model, they attempt to find sticky software ideas that can be developed using a combination of internal and crowdsourced skills and effort.
• Threadless, an Internet-based clothing retailer that sells t-shirts which have been designed by and rated by members of the public.
• Galaxy Zoo, a project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
• reCAPTCHA, used for deciphering ancient texts, by providing the ancient text (that can't be "read" properly by OCR software) to be read by end users of Captcha spam filter.
• Myndnet, Internet based information exchange that uses crowdsourcing for finding targeted leads for recruitement, sales and marketing. This is the first crowdsourcing application that has the potential for generating rich rewards for participants.
• In 2006, the American online DVD rental company Netflix announced that they were offering a $1,000,000 prize for anybody who could improve their existing DVD rating system by at least 10%. Contest participants can download vast amounts of anonymised data from Netflix to test their proposals. In addition to the big prize Netflix are offering annual progress prizes of $50,000. So far 17,000 attempts have been submitted; the best showing an improvement of 8.26% over Netflix’s current system.
• The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data on its Red Lake, Ontario property available to the public over the internet. They offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could analyse the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, over 80% of which proved productive; yielding 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion.
• Barrick Gold. Brarrick Gold has offered a $10 million prize for improvements to its silver extraction process.

Wikipedia (IPA: , or ( ) is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. ... Overview InnoCentive is an open innovation company that takes research and development problems in biology or chemistry, frames them as challenge problems, and opens them up for anyone to solve them. ... The phrase research and development (also R and D or, more often, R&D), according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, refers to creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use... A pharmaceutical company is a licensed drug company, licensed to discover, develop, markets and distribute drugs. ... The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) is a prominent philanthropic organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. ... Amazon. ... The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. ... An engraving of the Turk from Karl Gottlieb von Windischs 1784 book Inanimate Reason The Turk was a famous hoax that purported to be a chess-playing machine. ... This article is about the Western board game. ... Stardust@home is a project that encourages volunteers to search images for tiny interstellar dust impacts. ... ClickWorkers was a small NASA experimental project that used public volunteers (clickworkers) for scientific tasks that require human perception and common sense, but not a lot of scientific training. ... An artists rendering of Stardust (NASA image) The Stardust capsule with cometary and interstellar samples landed at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range at 10:10 UTC (15 January 2006) in the Bonneville Salt Flats. ... Cambrian House is a web-based community that combines the principles of wisdom of crowds and peer production to identify and develop sticky software ideas. ... Threadless is a community-centered online t-shirt store run by skinnyCorp of Chicago, Illinois since 2000. ... Galaxy Zoo is an online project which invites members of the public to assist in classifying over a million galaxies. ... SDSS Logo The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-filter imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2. ... An example of a reCAPTCHA challenge reCAPTCHA is the process of utilizing CAPTCHA to improve the process of digitizing books. ... Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), is the largest online DVD rental service, offering flat rate rental-by-mail to customers in the United States. ... Goldcorp is one of the world’s largest gold mining companies with the strongest production growth profile among all major gold companies. ...

Controversy

The design community has long debated the ethical, social, and economic implications of crowdsourcing. More recently the negative effects of crowdsourcing on business owners have been highlighted, particularly in regard to how a crowdsourced project can sometimes end up costing a business more than a traditionally outsourced project. ^[5]

Some of the pitfalls of crowdsourcing include:

• Added costs post-completion of a project to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion.
• Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will suffer failure due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale crowdsourced project.
• Below-market wages, or no wages at all. Barter agreements are often associated with crowdsourcing.
• No written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements or agreeable terms with crowdsourced employees.
• Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers throughout the duration of a project.

A 19th-centure example of barter: A sample labor for labor note for the Cincinnati Time Store. ...

Historical examples of crowdsourcing

• The Alkali Prize
• The Longitude Prize
• Fourneyron's Turbine
• Montyon Prizes
• Nicolas François Appert and food preservation
• Loebner Prize
• Millenium problems

The Leblanc process was the industrial process for the production of soda ash (sodium carbonate) used throughout the 19th century. ... The longitude prize was a prize offered by the British government through an Act of Parliament in 1714 for the precise determination of a ships longitude. ... Benoît Fourneyron (October 31, 1802 – July 31, 1867) was a French engineer, born in Saint-Étienne. ... Montyon Prizes (Prix Montyon) are a series of prizes awarded annually by the Académie Française. ... Nicolas François Appert (1750 - 1841) : French inventor of airtight food preservation. ... The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that awards prizes to the Chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most humanlike of those entered. ... The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) is a private, non-profit foundation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...

See also

• Clickworkers
• Configuration system
• Toolkits for User Innovation
• Buzzwords
• Wisdom of Crowds
• Wikinomics
• Collective intelligence
• distributed computing
• Open Innovation
• Mass Customization
• Crowdcasting
• The Long Tail

ClickWorkers was a small, experimental NASA project (run from November 2000 to September 2001) that showed that public volunteers (clickworkers), many working for a few minutes here and there and others choosing to work longer, can do some routine science analysis that would normally be done by a scientist or... Configuration systems which are also known as configurators assist users in designing a producible custom product for themselves that precisely meets their needs. ... Toolkits for user innovation (the process) is a innovation process in which the user itself does part of the innovation within a set environment. ... A buzzword (also known as a fashion word) is an idiom, often a neologism, commonly used in technical, administrative and political environments, consisting of an over-used word or phrase. ... The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than... Book cover of Wikinomics Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a December 2006 book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. ... It has been suggested that symbiotic intelligence be merged into this article or section. ... Distributed computing is a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network. ... Open Innovation is a term promoted by Henry Chesbrough, a professor and executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at Berkeley. ... LOLZ Mass customization is a business technique which allows any customer to buy a product or service that has been pre-designed(customized) to fit a customers exact needs. ... Crowdcasting- crowdcasting is the intersection of broadcasting and crowdsourcing. ... The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article[1] to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon. ...

References

This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

External links

• Crowdsourcing: tracking the rise of the amateur, Crowdsourcing blog by Jeff Howe, who coined the term "crowdsourcing" and wrote one of the first articles documenting the trend.
• Crowdsourcing: consumers as creators
• Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration
• Randy Burge: Internet allows us to resource the crowd, Burge Eye View (business column), Albuquerque Tribune (Albuquerque, New Mexico USA), April 9, 2007.
• Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness: Citizendium, Michael Ho, principal writer, Assignment Zero and Wired, May 3, 2007.
• InnoCentive: Crowdsourcing Diversity: What starts with the crowd ends in research and development, Randy Burge interviews Alph Bingham, cofounder of InnoCentive, for AssignmentZero and Wired (magazine), May 18, 2007.
• Openeur - Blog about Open Innovation & Entrepreneurship - benefits of Crowdsourcing for the crowd