Do you know what it means?

Crowdsourcing is the process of connecting with large groups of people via the Internet who are tapped for their knowledge, expertise, time, or resources.

This idea of reaching out to the crowd isn't new; even before crowdsourcing on the Internet, we often collaborated with groups of people.

Some people help because they were seeking a reward for their efforts, or sometimes they just wanted to help.

Let's go back to 1714: Sailing the Seven Seas was necessary but really dangerous to navigate.

So, the British government held a contest, asking people for a solution.

John Harrison answered the call, he invented the marine chronometer, and was awarded a large cash prize.

Sailors used the marine chronometer to determine the ship's longitude, with the help from the stars.

Let's move forward a bit to 1858⏤a group of scholars created the first Oxford English Dictionary.

It was a huge project, and they needed help.

So, they asked for lots of volunteers to write about different topics according to their expertise, and then they put it all together.

The point is, relying on the crowd isn't really a newfangled idea.

But it wasn't until we all got connected that crowdsourcing came about,

because with the Internet, you can reach lots of people very quickly, and you can direct and organize their work.

Think of it like this: Crowdsourcing is a way of solving problems and producing things by connecting online with people that you otherwise wouldn't know.

Anyone can use crowdsourcing: companies, governments, groups, and individuals.

They can use it to grow their organizations or support their causes.

There are four different ways crowdsourcing works.

The first enables you to access a large online labor force.

You can identify and select workers, or you can just post your work and let the workers find you.

The second allows you to ask the crowd to help you find a solution to a problem.

A third is when knowledge exists, but you need help finding and organizing it.

The fourth is when you need ideas from the crowd and their opinion and feedback.

So, as you can see, there are different ways crowdsourcing works, and there are different things you can do with crowdsourcing.

When you use the crowd to help collect and organize information, we call this "Accessing Distributed Knowledge".

"Crowdfunding", where you can raise capital from many individuals who believe in your venture or cause,

each making small donations that add up to a lot.

When you use crowdsourcing to connect with an on-demand scalable workforce to perform a broad range of tasks, we call this "Accessing Cloud Labor".

"Open Innovation" is where you use crowdsourcing to reach diverse and creative people for new-idea generation and problem-solving.

Crowdsourcing can be used to access the world's creative communities to design and develop original art, media, or content; we call this "Crowd Creativity".

There are many tools available that can be used in crowdsourcing that support collaboration and communication among distributed groups of people.

You want to know more, right? I thought so.

Visit crowdsourcing.org for everything you want to know about crowdsourcing.

Take a step further,

and visit masssolution.com for assistance with your crowdsourcing initiatives and to learn how to benefit from crowdsourcing.