Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.
If you’re looking for a logo design, you can tell a crowd of designers what you want, how much you will pay, and your deadline. All interested designers will create a finished design specifically for you. You’ll receive 50-300+ different finished logo designs, and you can keep whichever design you like the best. By doing design this way, crowdsourcing actually increases the quality & decreases the price, compared to online freelancing.
Crowdsourcing can also be used to get designs for furniture, fashion, advertisements, video, & product design. Just about anything that can be designed can be crowdsourced.
Crowdfunding involves asking a crowd of people to donate money to your project. For example, if you want to raise $10,000 to pay for studio time to record a new CD, crowdfunding can help you raise that money.. You find a crowdfunding platform, set the goal amount, deadline, and any rewards offered to donors. You must raise 100% of your goal before the deadline, or all the donations are returned to the donors. Deadlines are typically less than 60 days.
Crowdfunding is mostly used by artists, charities, & start-ups to raise money for projects such as filming a documentary, manufacturing an iPod watch, cancer research, or seed money. Read more about crowdfunding or browse crowdfunding sites.
Microtasking involves breaking work up into tiny tasks and sending the work to a crowd of people. If you have 1,000 photos on your website that need captions, you can ask 1,000 individual people to each add a caption to one photo. Break up the work and decide the payment for each completed task (typically .01¢ – .10¢ per task). With microtasking, you can expect to see results within minutes. Microtasking can involve tasks such as scanning images, proofreading, database correction and transcribing audio files.
Work is done faster, cheaper, and usually with less errors (when validation systems are in place). Additionally, microtasks can often be performed by people in less fortunate countries, including those with SMS capabilities but without computers. Read more about microtasks or browse microtasks sites.
If you are unsure of where to begin with an idea for a business opportunity, whether it’s product design or perhaps a marketing firm, crowdsourcing can help through open innovation. Open innovation allows people from all aspects of business such as investors, designers, inventors, and marketers to collaborate into a functional profit making reality. This can be done either through a dedicated web platform to gain outside perspective, or used with only internal employees.
Open innovation brings together people from different parts of the world and different sectors of business to work together on a project. This is effectively a collection of different fields and levels of expertise that would not otherwise be available to any budding entrepreneur. It also elevates previously considered uninvolved parties, such as investors, to roll up their sleeves and impart their knowledge, essentially becoming more than just a cash cow.
- Possibly the earliest example of crowdsourcing is the collection of words for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In 1858, a group called the Philological Society contracted with over 800 volunteer readers to collect words from all available books and document their usages. Subsequently, the group solicited broader public input and received over six million submissions over the 70 years of the project
- In 1936, Toyota held a contest seeking a new logo design. The winning design from over 26,000 entries remained the company's corporate logo until 1989
- Wikipedia launched as a collaboratively written and edited online encyclopedia in January 2001. Free registration enabled anyone to submit or edit an entry. The multilingual site now hosts several million entries in English alone
- After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, an ad-hoc 911 service was created and established in response to a tweet sent out asking for help
- An astronomy project called Galaxy Zoo solicited help in classifying more than a million galaxies. Within an hour of the website launch, volunteers were submitting 70,000 classifications per hour.
Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.
( "Crowdsourcing - Definition and More". Merriam-Webster.com. August 31, 2012. Retrieved 2014-02-03. )
Crowdsourcing is familiarized with high usage of internet. But it has a background a long time before the internet came into our lives. To give some examples to this old background, we can list some events as follows:
- 1714 – The Longitude Prize: When the British government was trying to find a way to measure a ship’s longitude, they offered the public a monetary prize to whomever came up with the best solution
- 1783 – King Louis XVI offered an award to the person who could ‘make the alkali’ by decomposing sea salt by the ‘simplest and most economic method.
- 1884 – Publication of the Oxford English Dictionary: 800 volunteers catalogued words to create the first fascicle of the OED
- 1916 – Planters Peanuts contest: The Mr. Peanut logo was designed by a fourteen-year old boy who won the Planter Peanuts logo contest.
- 1957 – “Jørn Utzon selected as winner for design competition for Sydney Opera House”
Modern Methods
Crowdvoting
Crowdwoting is simply taking opinion of the public users via suverys. It helps develop ideas by many people and directly by the customers.
Crowdsourcing Creative Work
This method is about, people contributing to an open creative work such as a writing, a graphic design, a good music, an animation, a piano, etc.
Microwork
Microwork is having people to do small works for computers to do very expensive. Best Example is "Amazon Mechanical Turk" pays small amount money to people in exchange of their work.
Macrowork
Macrowork is similar to the microwork, but it requires certain amount of time and very few amount of skills.
(Dawson Ross, Getting Results From Crowds (2012), http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/a-brief-history-of-crowdsourcing-infographic/12532)