Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing, a modern business term coined in 2006, is defined by Merriam-Webster as the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially an online community, rather than from employees or suppliers. A portmanteau of crowd and outsourcing, its more specific definitions are yet heavily debated. This mode of sourcing is often used to divide work between participants, and has a history of success prior to the digital age—"offline". By definition, crowdsourcing combines the efforts of numerous self-selected volunteers or part-time workers; each person's contribution combines with those of others to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work can come from an undefined public (instead of being commissioned from a specific, named group) and in that crowdsourcing includes a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes. Regarding the most significant advantages of using crowdsourcing the literature generally discussed costs, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability, and diversity.