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".[1][2][3] In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.[4][5][6]
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.[7][8] Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation.[8][9][10][11] 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 (e.g. Lego Ideas).[12][13][promotion?] 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.[14]
^Brabham, D. C. (2013). Crowdsourcing. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press.
^Brabham, D. C. (2008). "Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving an Introduction and Cases". Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 14 (1): 75–90. CiteSeerX10.1.1.175.1623. doi:10.1177/1354856507084420. S2CID145310730.
^Prpić, J., & Shukla, P. (2016). Crowd Science: Measurements, Models, and Methods. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kauai, Hawaii: IEEE Computer Society. arXiv:1702.04221
^ abPrpić, John; Taeihagh, Araz; Melton, James (September 2015). "The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing". Policy & Internet. 7 (3): 340–361. arXiv:1802.04143. doi:10.1002/poi3.102. S2CID3626608.
^Afuah, A.; Tucci, C. L. (2012). "Crowdsourcing as a Solution to Distant Search". Academy of Management Review. 37 (3): 355–375. doi:10.5465/amr.2010.0146.
^de Vreede, T., Nguyen, C., de Vreede, G. J., Boughzala, I., Oh, O., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2013). A Theoretical Model of User Engagement in Crowdsourcing. In Collaboration and Technology (pp. 94–109). Springer Berlin Heidelberg