Crowdsourcing


Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
Advantages of using crowdsourcing include lowered costs, improved speed, improved quality, increased flexibility, and/or increased scalability of the work, as well as promoting diversity. Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation. Some forms of crowdsourcing, such as in "idea competitions" or "innovation contests" provide ways for organizations to learn beyond the "base of minds" provided by their employees. Commercial platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, match microtasks submitted by requesters to workers who perform them. Crowdsourcing is also used by nonprofit organizations to develop common goods, such as Wikipedia.

Definitions

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", which quickly led to the portmanteau "crowdsourcing". The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first use: "OED's earliest evidence for crowdsourcing is from 2006, in the writing of J. Howe." The online dictionary Merriam-Webster defines it as: "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers."
Daren C. Brabham defined crowdsourcing as an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model." Kristen L. Guth and Brabham found that the performance of ideas offered in crowdsourcing platforms are affected not only by their quality, but also by the communication among users about the ideas, and presentation in the platform itself.
Despite the multiplicity of definitions for crowdsourcing, one constant has been the broadcasting of problems to the public, and an open call for contributions to help solve the problem. Members of the public submit solutions that are then owned by the entity who originally broadcast the problem. In some cases, the contributor of the solution is compensated monetarily with prizes or public recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be praise or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, from experts, or from small businesses.

Historical examples

While the term "crowdsourcing" was popularized online to describe Internet-based activities, some examples of projects, in retrospect, can be described as crowdsourcing.

Timeline of crowdsourcing examples

  • 618–907 – The Tang dynasty of China introduced the joint-stock company, the earliest form of crowdfunding. This was evident during the cold period of the Tang Dynasty when the colder climates resulted in poor harvests and the lessening of agricultural taxes, culminating in the fragmentation of the agricultural sector. The fragmentation meant that the government had to reform the tax system relying more on the taxation of salt and most importantly business leading to the creation of the Joint-Stock Company.
  • 1567 – King Philip II of Spain offered a cash prize for calculating the longitude of a vessel while at sea.
  • 1714 – The longitude rewards: When the British government was trying to find a way to measure a ship's longitudinal position, they offered the public a monetary prize to whoever 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".
  • 1848 – Matthew Fontaine Maury distributed 5000 copies of his Wind and Current Charts free of charge on the condition that sailors returned a standardized log of their voyage to the U.S. Naval Observatory. By 1861, he had distributed 200,000 copies free of charge, on the same conditions.
  • 1849 – A network of some 150 volunteer weather observers all over the USA was set up as a part of the Smithsonian Institution's Meteorological Project started by the Smithsonian's first Secretary, Joseph Henry, who used the telegraph to gather volunteers' data and create a large weather map, making new information available to the public daily. For instance, volunteers tracked a tornado passing through Wisconsin and sent the findings via telegraph to the Smithsonian. Henry's project is considered the origin of what later became the National Weather Service. Within a decade, the project had more than 600 volunteer observers and had spread to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
  • 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 14-year-old boy who won the Planter Peanuts logo contest.
  • 1957 – Jørn Utzon was selected as winner of the design competition for the Sydney Opera House.
  • 1970 – French amateur photo contest C'était Paris en 1970 was sponsored by the city of Paris, France-Inter radio, and the Fnac: 14,000 photographers produced 70,000 black-and-white prints and 30,000 color slides of the French capital to document the architectural changes of Paris. Photographs were donated to the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.
  • 1979 – Robert Axelrod invited academics on-line to submit FORTRAN algorithms to play the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma; A tit for tat algorithm ended up in first place.
  • 1981 - Jilly Cooper gathered stories about mongrels for the book Intelligent and Loyal, by putting an advert in newspapers asking people to share stories about their pets for the book.
  • 1983 – Richard Stallman began work on the GNU operating system. Programmers fromaround the world contribute to the GNU operating system. Linux kernel is one of the kernels used in this operating system, thus forming the GNU/Linux operating system, which many people call as Linux.
  • 1996 – The Hollywood Stock Exchange was founded: It allowed buying and selling of shares.
  • 1997 – British rock band Marillion raised $60,000 from their fans to help finance their U.S. tour.
  • 1999 – SETI@home was launched by the University of California, Berkeley. Volunteers can contribute to searching for signals that might come from extraterrestrial intelligence by installing a program that uses idle computer time for analyzing chunks of data recorded by radio telescopes involved in the SERENDIP program.
  • 1999– The U.S. Geological Survey's "Did You Feel It?" website was used in the US as a method where by residents could report any tremors or shocks they felt from a recent earthquake and the approximate magnitude of the earthquake.
  • 2000 – JustGiving was established: This online platform allows the public to help raise money for charities.
  • 2000 – UNV Online Volunteering service launched: Connecting people who commit their time and skills over the Internet to help organizations address development challenges.
  • 2000 – iStockPhoto was founded: The free stock imagery website allows the public to contribute to and receive commission for their contributions.
  • 2001 – Launch of Wikipedia: "Free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia".
  • 2001 – Foundation of Topcoder – crowdsourcing software development company.
  • 2004 – OpenStreetMap, a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world, was launched.
  • 2004 – Toyota's first "Dream car art" contest: Children were asked globally to draw their "dream car of the future".
  • 2005 – Kodak's "Go for the Gold" contest: Kodak asked anyone to submit a picture of a personal victory.
  • 2005 – Amazon Mechanical Turk was launched publicly on November 2, 2005. It enables businesses to hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do.
  • 2005 – Reddit was launched in 2005. Reddit is a social media platform and online community where users can submit, discuss and vote, leading to diverse discussions and interactions.
  • 2009 – Waze, a community-oriented GPS app, was created. It allows users to submit road information and route data based on location, such as reports of car accidents or traffic, and integrates that data into its routing algorithms for all users of the app.
  • 2010 - Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP initiated a crowdsourcing effort called the "Deepwater Horizon Response," inviting external experts and the public to submit innovative ideas and technical solutions for containing and cleaning up the massive oil spill. This initiative aimed to leverage collective intelligence to address the unprecedented environmental disaster.
  • 2010 – The 1947 Partition Archive, an oral history project that asked community members around the world to document oral histories from aging witnesses of a significant but under-documented historical event, the 1947 Partition of India, was founded.
  • 2011 – Casting of Flavours – a campaign launched by PepsiCo's Lay's in Spain. The campaign was to create a new flavor for the snack where the consumers were directly involved in its formation.
  • 2012 - Open Food Facts, a collaborative project to create a libre encyclopedia of food products in the world using smartphones, is launched, followed by extensions on cosmetics, pet food, other products and prices.