Crowdsourcing is the act of producing work by encouraging people to contribute ideas for a specific task. The theory behind crowdsourcing is that the best ideas arise the most often, and that they are produced by collective, rather than individual, effort.
Crowdsourcing is usually organized through social media , social networking, and websites . It allows people from all over the world to contribute to improving the way things work. Crowdsourcing ideas have resulted in better designs of such products as cars and bicycles. Some ideas have improved social activity, such as the organizing of major events.
The concept of crowdsourcing—that is, using a crowd to achieve a goal—gained the interest of academics and journalists in the early 2000’s. In 2004, American journalist James Surowiecki’s best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds cited many examples of how collective decisions have resulted in better decisions.
The term crowdsourcing—a combination of the words crowd and outsourcing —was coined in 2006, when an editor at Wired magazine wrote about the future of work in the article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” The article describes how businesses were finding products and services they needed by outsourcing to the crowd—that is, to people outside their company. It explained how companies bought items or technical solutions at a lower cost by using the contributions of many such people. Often, people who do not work for a company are willing to suggest ideas to be helpful, even if they are not paid for their intellectual work. Since then, crowdsourcing has become a popular form of collective decision-making. Many organizations try to incorporate crowdsourcing as a regular part of their business model.
Although collecting ideas that are given freely can be useful, crowdsourcing a project can also bring about less professional results by participants with little experience. Some people are concerned about giving nonprofessionals too much credit for ideas they give freely. Economists also have expressed concern about the future of unpaid labor and what it means for companies that require specialized knowledge from paid professionals.
