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Web's Largest listing of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding events
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A blog post covering some of the ways government is using crowdsourcing to solve problems and improve public participation.
This article covers such successful and failed crowdsourced advertising contests as Doritos' Crash the Super Bowl campaign, Chevy Tahoe's crowdsourcing venture, and Heinz's failed...
This paper discusses a public participation model utilizing “crowdsourcing,” which is a Web-based, distributed problem solving model already in use by a number of online businesses, a model which...
This article summarizes the motivations for crowds to participate in crowdsourcing.
This article is an overview of crowdsourcing and also contributes a four-part typology of crowdsourcing applications based on problem type. These four types are: 1) Knowledge Discovery and...
Public involvement is a central concern for urban planners, but the challenge for planners is how best to implement such programs, given many difficulties inherent in the typical public involvement...
Based on 17 interviews with members of the crowd at Threadless, the present study adds qualitatively rich data on a new crowdsourcing case to an existing body of quantitative data on motivations...
This paper analyzes the discourse of amateurism as it relates to crowdsourcing. This paper's findings are twofold: (1) crowdsourcing is discussed in the popular press as a process driven by...
Targeting PR campaigns to specific publics online is challenging. The global reach of the Internet challenges a public relations practitioner’s confidence that an online message targeted at a set...
Organizations implement crowdsourcing applications in the hopes that the participation of an online community — a crowd — results in the design of goods or the solving of problems for the organization. Thus, it is important to understand how and why individuals in the crowd participate in these arrangements in order to maximize the crowd’s abilities. Crowds participate in crowdsourcing willingly, and they are not always driven by the opportunity to make money in the process. An organization that understands what motivates its crowd to participate and fulfills these needs will sustain a productive crowdsourcing platform.
In the past few years, research has been conducted specifically on the crowds of some well-known crowdsourcing applications to determine what motivates them to participate. These findings indicate that crowds are motivated by a diverse set of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, and individuals in the same crowd can be motivated for different reasons. Some common crowdsourcing motivators include the desire to earn money, to develop one’s creative skills, to network with other creative professionals, to build a portfolio for future employment, to challenge oneself to solve a tough problem, to pass the time when bored, to contribute to a large project for the common good, and to have fun.
In input-gathering public relations campaigns, amateurs truly are engaging the product in a small way, casting thousands or millions of votes to determine the product they will have an opportunity to purchase next. But this “engagement of the masses” in product development does not translate to real crowdsourcing activities. Really, those with specific interests or professional training are more likely to participate in crowdsourcing contests. These are not everyday people who pick up a video camera and try to produce a commercial.
The term “crowdsourcing” desperately needs some boundaries. Too many people have liberally applied the term to all manner of online—and offline—phenomena, but I argue crowdsourcing is, in fact, quite a narrowly defined concept. It is important to rein in crowdsourcing, because if the term rests on muddy foundations, people will continue to draw unstable, untested conclusions about the power and purpose of this model. I have dedicated my young academic career to the study of crowdsourcing, and I want to assert a clearer definition of crowdsourcing here for the sake of continued scholarly study and practical application.
Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
