crowdsourcing

The term crowdsourcing is a word creation from crowd and outsourcing. In crowdsourcing, the service is provided by an inhomogeneous crowd of people who collaboratively solve an outsourced task. It is a division of labor for people with different levels of knowledge and education to contribute to a project.

The contributors in crowdsourcing use modern information technology and can contribute with Bring your own Device( ByoD). The projects themselves can be stored in clouds, but also in closed or social networks.

Contributors to crowdsourcing are sought by calling on social networks and encouraged to participate. In general, crowdsourcing is about incorporating thought-provoking impulses, the knowledge and experience of many people into the process in order to achieve more flexible, more diverse approaches to solutions and to reduce errors.

Crowdsourcing is practiced, among other things, in social commerce and social shopping, in which the opinion of many is used to make a purchasing decision. It is used in idea generation and product innovation and, for example, in Wikipedia, which is created in collaborative work by many experts. Another form of crowdsourcing is crowdfunding, in which as many people as possible make a small financial contribution on special websites to finance a start-up, a marketing idea, a project or a product development.