Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).
The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.

History
The word was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article.[2] Though the term is new there are examples of projects being run on similar models for some time. Recently, the Internet has been used to publicize and manage crowdsourcing projects.

Wikipedia®