Crowdsourcing

Part of: Impact of Computing

Harnessing the Crowd. Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining input, ideas, content, or funding by enlisting the services of a large number of people, typically via the internet. The web makes it possible to coordinate contributions from strangers around the world at very low cost. Why Crowdsourcing Works. - Scale : thousands of small contributions add up to something no individual could build. - Diversity : many perspectives surface ideas an expert team would miss. - Speed : many people working in parallel solve problems quickly. Classic examples include collaborative encyclopedias, citizen-science projects that classify galaxies or count wildlife, crowdfunding platforms that raise money for projects, and product reviews that aggregate many opinions. Strengths and Limits. Crowdsourcing can democratize problem-solving, but quality control is a challenge: contributions vary in accuracy, and the crowd can be manipulated. Good systems combine crowd input with review, voting, or reputation to keep quality high. What usually goes wrong. What you see What caused it How to fix it --- --- --- You call any group project crowdsourcing the scale and the openness were left out of the defini

Challenge: Average the Crowd