Crowdsourcing

The crowdsourced Wikipedia has this to say on the issue (on the page co-edited by yours truly):

Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of “crowd” and “outsourcing” for the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.

The word was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article.

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization. Jeff Howe has differentiated four types of crowdsourcing strategies:

• Crowdfunding
• Crowdcreation*
• Crowdvoting
• Crowdwisdom

The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis. Other differences between open source and crowdsourced production relate to the motivations of individuals to participate.

Read this nice list of crowdsourcing projects.

* “The Portland Bottom Line” is an example of crowdcreation.