Sourcing services or funds from a group
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". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
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. Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation. 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). 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.
Definitions.
The term "crowdsourcing" was coined in 2006 by two editors at "Wired", Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, to describe how businesses were using the Internet to "outsource work to the crowd", which quickly led to the portmanteau "crowdsourcing". The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first use: "OED's earliest evidence for crowdsourcing is from 2006, in the writing of J. Howe." The online dictionary Merriam-Webster defines it as: "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers."
Daren C. Brabham defined crowdsourcing as an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model." Kristen L. Guth and Brabham found that the performance of ideas offered in crowdsourcing platforms are affected not only by their quality, but also by the communication among users about the ideas, and presentation in the platform itself.
Despite the multiplicity of definitions for crowdsourcing, one constant has been the broadcasting of problems to the public, and an open call for contributions to help solve the problem. Members of the public submit solutions that are then owned by the entity who originally broadcast the problem. In some cases, the contributor of the solution is compensated monetarily with prizes or public recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be praise or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, from experts, or from small businesses.
Historical examples.
While the term "crowdsourcing" was popularized online to describe Internet-based activities, some examples of projects, in retrospect, can be described as crowdsourcing.
Early competitions.
Crowdsourcing has often been used in the past as a competition to discover a solution. The French government proposed several of these competitions, often rewarded with Montyon Prizes. These included the Leblanc process, or the Alkali prize, where a reward was provided for separating the salt from the alkali, and the Fourneyron's turbine, when the first hydraulic commercial turbine was developed.
In response to a challenge from the French government, Nicolas Appert won a prize for inventing a new way of food preservation that involved sealing food in air-tight jars. The British government provided a similar reward to find an easy way to determine a ship's longitude in the Longitude Prize. During the Great Depression, out-of-work clerks tabulated higher mathematical functions in the Mathematical Tables Project as an outreach project. One of the largest crowdsourcing campaigns was a public design contest in 2010 hosted by the Indian government's finance ministry to create a symbol for the Indian rupee. Thousands of people sent in entries before the government zeroed in on the final symbol based on the Devanagari script using the letter Ra.
Applications.
A number of motivations exist for businesses to use crowdsourcing to accomplish their tasks. These include the ability to offload peak demand, access cheap labor and information, generate better results, access a wider array of talent than what is present in one organization, and undertake problems that would have been too difficult to solve internally. Crowdsourcing allows businesses to submit problems on which contributors can work—on topics such as science, manufacturing, biotech, and medicine—optionally with monetary rewards for successful solutions. Although crowdsourcing complicated tasks can be difficult, simple work tasks can be crowdsourced cheaply and effectively.
Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use. Urban and transit planning are prime areas for crowdsourcing. For example, from 2008 to 2009, a crowdsourcing project for transit planning in Salt Lake City was created to test the public participation process. Another notable application of crowdsourcing for government problem-solving is Peer-to-Patent, which was an initiative to improve patent quality in the United States through gathering public input in a structured, productive manner.
Researchers have used crowdsourcing systems such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or CloudResearch to aid their research projects by crowdsourcing some aspects of the research process, such as data collection, parsing, and evaluation to the public. Notable examples include using the crowd to create speech and language databases, to conduct user studies, and to run behavioral science surveys and experiments. Crowdsourcing systems provided researchers with the ability to gather large amounts of data, and helped researchers to collect data from populations and demographics they may not have access to locally.
Artists have also used crowdsourcing systems. In a project called the Sheep Market, Aaron Koblin used Mechanical Turk to collect 10,000 drawings of sheep from contributors around the world. Artist Sam Brown leveraged the crowd by asking visitors of his website explodingdog to send him sentences to use as inspirations for his paintings. Art curator Andrea Grover argues that individuals tend to be more open in crowdsourced projects because they are not being physically judged or scrutinized. As with other types of uses, artists use crowdsourcing systems to generate and collect data. The crowd also can be used to provide inspiration and to collect financial support for an artist's work.
In navigation systems, crowdsourcing from 100 million drivers were used by INRIX to collect users' driving times to provide better GPS routing and real-time traffic updates.
In healthcare.
The use of crowdsourcing in medical and health research is increasing systematically. The process involves outsourcing tasks or gathering input from a large, diverse groups of people, often facilitated through digital platforms, to contribute to medical research, diagnostics, data analysis, promotion, and various healthcare-related initiatives. Usage of this innovative approach supplies a useful community-based method to improve medical services.
From funding individual medical cases and innovative devices to supporting research, community health initiatives, and crisis responses, crowdsourcing proves its versatile impact in addressing diverse healthcare challenges.
In 2011, UNAIDS initiated the participatory online policy project to better engage young people in decision-making processes related to AIDS. The project acquired data from 3,497 participants across seventy-nine countries through online and offline forums. The outcomes generally emphasized the importance of youth perspectives in shaping strategies to effectively address AIDS which provided a valuable insight for future community empowerment initiatives. 
Another approach is sourcing results of clinical algorithms from collective input of participants. Researchers from SPIE developed a crowdsourcing tool, to train individuals, especially middle and high school students in South Korea, to diagnose malaria-infected red blood cells. Using a statistical framework, the platform combined expert diagnoses with those from minimally trained individuals, creating a gold standard library. The objective was to swiftly teach people to achieve great diagnosis accuracy without any prior training.
Cancer medicine journal conducted a review of the studies published between January 2005 and June 2016 on crowdsourcing in cancer research, with the usage PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, PsychINFO, and Embase. All of them strongly advocate for continuous efforts to refine and expand crowdsourcing applications in academic scholarship. Analysis highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations and widespread dissemination of knowledge; the review underscored the need to fully harness crowdsourcing's potential to address challenges within cancer research.
In science.
Astronomy.
Crowdsourcing in astronomy was used in the early 19th century by astronomer Denison Olmsted. After being awakened in a late November night due to a meteor shower taking place, Olmsted noticed a pattern in the shooting stars. Olmsted wrote a brief report of this meteor shower in the local newspaper. "As the cause of 'Falling Stars' is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible", Olmsted wrote to readers, in a report subsequently picked up and pooled to newspapers nationwide. Responses came pouring in from many states, along with scientists' observations sent to the "American Journal of Science and Arts". These responses helped him to make a series of scientific breakthroughs including observing the fact that meteor showers are seen nationwide and fall from space under the influence of gravity. The responses also allowed him to approximate a velocity for the meteors.
A more recent version of crowdsourcing in astronomy is NASA's photo organizing project, which asked internet users to browse photos taken from space and try to identify the location the picture is documenting.
Behavioral science
In the field of behavioral science, crowdsourcing is often used to gather data and insights on human behavior and decision making. Researchers may create online surveys or experiments that are completed by a large number of participants, allowing them to collect a diverse and potentially large amount of data. Crowdsourcing can also be used to gather real-time data on behavior, such as through the use of mobile apps that track and record users' activities and decision making. The use of crowdsourcing in behavioral science has the potential to greatly increase the scope and efficiency of research, and has been used in studies on topics such as psychology research, political attitudes, and social media use.
Energy system research.
Energy system models require large and diverse datasets, increasingly so given the trend towards greater temporal and spatial resolution. In response, there have been several initiatives to crowdsource this data. Launched in December 2009, OpenEI is a collaborative website run by the US government that provides open energy data. While much of its information is from US government sources, the platform also seeks crowdsourced input from around the world. The semantic wiki and database Enipedia also publishes energy systems data using the concept of crowdsourced open information. Enipedia went live in March 2011.
Genealogy research.
Genealogical research used crowdsourcing techniques long before personal computers were common. Beginning in 1942, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encouraged members to submit information about their ancestors. The submitted information was gathered together into a single collection. In 1969, to encourage more participation, the church started the three-generation program. In this program, church members were asked to prepare documented family group record forms for the first three generations. The program was later expanded to encourage members to research at least four generations and became known as the four-generation program.
Institutes that have records of interest to genealogical research have used crowds of volunteers to create catalogs and indices to records.
Genetic genealogy research
Genetic genealogy is a combination of traditional genealogy with genetics. The rise of personal DNA testing, after the turn of the century, by companies such as Gene by Gene, FTDNA, GeneTree, 23andMe, and Ancestry.com, has led to public and semi public databases of DNA testing using crowdsourcing techniques. Citizen science projects have included support, organization, and dissemination of personal DNA (genetic) testing. Similar to amateur astronomy, citizen scientists encouraged by volunteer organizations like the International Society of Genetic Genealogy have provided valuable information and research to the professional scientific community. The Genographic Project, which began in 2005, is a research project carried out by the National Geographic Society's scientific team to reveal patterns of human migration using crowdsourced DNA testing and reporting of results.
Ornithology.
Another early example of crowdsourcing occurred in the field of ornithology. On 25 December 1900, Frank Chapman, an early officer of the National Audubon Society, initiated a tradition dubbed the "Christmas Day Bird Census". The project called birders from across North America to count and record the number of birds in each species they witnessed on Christmas Day. The project was successful, and the records from 27 different contributors were compiled into one bird census, which tallied around 90 species of birds. This large-scale collection of data constituted an early form of citizen science, the premise upon which