{"id":2950,"date":"2011-11-04T04:27:15","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T08:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/?p=2950"},"modified":"2021-10-19T06:57:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T10:57:41","slug":"crowdsourcing-concept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/crowdsourcing-concept\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing \u2013 what it is, and how you can use it."},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a shocking article that appeared a few months ago, asking if the concept of regular employment itself was outdated.\u00a0 The issue raised from it was that, as opposed to steady jobs, our economy was moving more towards a dynamically shifting pool of freelancers<\/a>, moving quickly from one employer to the next.\u00a0 What perhaps was most shocking about it was that, with so many people actually taking part in this new type of work, it didn’t actually shock many people.<\/p>\n

This is the business revolution represented by the term \u201ccrowdsourcing.\u201d\u00a0 The word was introduced in a 2006 article in Wired magazine<\/a>.\u00a0 The concept has taken off like a rocket since and hasn’t stopped for breath.\u00a0 If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a summary to catch you up to speed.\u00a0 If you are familiar with it and want to use it, here are some tips from the pros.<\/p>\n

A new name for an old concept<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first instance of effective crowdsourcing is older than all of us.\u00a0 One of the earliest editions of the Oxford English Dictionary was created by the collaborative work of about 800 volunteers.\u00a0 OK, this is about as relevant to modern crowdsourcing as the first 17th<\/sup> century steam automobile is to a Ferrari.\u00a0 Still, the dictionary is still with us, and now again, so is the concept.<\/p>\n

What crowdsourcing does is to tap into \u201ccollective intelligence\u201d, that is, the ideas that are generated by approaching problems as a large group rather than an individual or small set of them.\u00a0 It generally works like this:<\/p>\n

A company or other organization posts a service that they need to appeal to an open pool of applicants to find an answer to.\u00a0 Examples of common crowdsourcing requests are the generation of company logos, solutions to governmental public policy problems, software testing, programming, and writing of all kinds.\u00a0 In reality, though, it can be just about anything that you might want to \u201cpoll the audience\u201d for.<\/p>\n

The crowd finds a needle in the interstellar haystack<\/strong><\/p>\n

An example from just a few days ago underscores the potential power of crowdsourcing.\u00a0 Rainer Kracht, a retired school teacher in Elmshorn, Germany, reviewed images sent to the crowd from the Teide Observatory Tenerife Asteroid Survey (TOTAS).\u00a0 This observatory was sponsored by the Space Situational Awareness program, a European Space Agency project.\u00a0 What he saw in one of the images was eventually named \u201c2011 SF108\u201d, an asteroid set to approach to within 19 million miles of earth (that’s not as far as it sounds).\u00a0 The image was confirmed by other volunteers in the crowd before receiving its official designation.<\/p>\n

The vastness of space makes it impossible to rely completely on even the best computers to scan through all of the data for anomalies.\u00a0 Here, then, is an example of how instead of using even more powerful processors, you can instead go to the collective observation of several thousand sets of eyes.<\/p>\n

Where is the crowd now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are too many crowdsourcing projects in existence now to even begin to summarize all of them.\u00a0 Here are just a few of the more notable examples:<\/p>\n