Crowdsourcing is a business model in which a company obtains ideas, content, services or funding by inviting contributions from a large, dispersed group of people, typically over the internet, rather than from its own employees or established suppliers. The term is a portmanteau of crowd and outsourcing, coined in 2006 by Wired magazine editors Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson to describe businesses using the internet to farm work out to the public. Contributions are usually gathered through a digital platform that distributes small tasks, ideas or funding requests to many participants and aggregates the results, and contributors may be paid, compete for prizes, or take part purely for recognition or interest.
Facts
Core MechanismCrowdsourcing obtains work, ideas, funding or data by soliciting voluntary or paid contributions from a large, open group of people rather than from employees or designated suppliers, today usually coordinated through a digital platform. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are sibling coinages from the same internet-enabled crowd-participation wave: crowdsourcing gathers ideas, content or labor from a dispersed public, crowdfunding gathers money from one.
Crowdsourcing, drawing on a large distributed group for ideas, content or funding, is a practice widely adopted by technology-industry platforms.
Sources
1. Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing
WikipediaLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result.
1. Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing
WikipediaLead section, term coinageQuote, Lead section, term coinage
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'.
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