Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, this process can occur both online and offline. The general concept is to combine the efforts of crowds of volunteers or part-time workers, where each one could contribute a small portion, which adds into a relatively large or significant result.
Crowdsourcing is different from an ordinary outsourcing since it is a task or problem that is outsourced to an undefined public rather than to a specific, named group. Although the word "crowdsourcing" was coined in 2006, it can apply to a wide range of older activities. Crowdsourcing can involve division of labor for tedious tasks split to use crowd-based outsourcing, but it can also apply to specific requests, such as crowdvoting, crowdfunding, a broad-based competition, and a general search for answers, solutions, or a missing person.
Crowdsourcing & Quality: The principle of crowdsourcing is that more heads are better than one. By canvassing a large crowd of people for ideas, skills, or participation, the quality of content and idea generation will be superior.
A group of crowdsourcing industry practitioners that have organized themselves with the mission of advancing the crowdsourcing industry through best practices, education, data collection, and public dialog. Designed to use the very mechanism that the industry is built upon – crowdsourcing – to solve issues that arise as crowdsourcing develops.
By applying the collective wisdom of our members experiences, we are able to produce solutions that benefit all of our members. Members contribute new thoughts, ideas, and solutions that benefit every part of the crowdsourcing ecosystem, helping it to continuously evolve and grow.
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