Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing obtains ideas, information, labor, or services by inviting contributions from a large, often open group of people, usually online.
Open call: A public invitation for anyone meeting stated conditions to submit contributions or proposals. Crowdsourcing often begins by inviting an undefined group rather than selecting contributors in advance.
Jeff Howe: An American journalist who introduced the word “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article. Howe named the emerging practice and helped establish its modern definition.
Wikipedia: A multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained collaboratively by volunteers. It is a prominent example of an open community producing a shared reference work.
Traditional outsourcing: Contracting a defined service or task to a selected external supplier. It is the closest organizational alternative, but typically relies on a chosen provider rather than an open crowd.
Digital labor: Work performed through digital technologies, including online content creation, data production, and platform-mediated tasks. Crowdsourcing is one way digital labor is organized and distributed.
Microtasking: A work model that divides a larger job into small tasks completed independently, often online. Breaking work into tiny units lets crowdsourcing distribute tasks across many contributors.
Wired: An American magazine covering technology, science, culture, and their social effects. Its 2006 article gave crowdsourcing its name and brought the practice to wider attention.
Citizen science: Scientific research that involves members of the public in collecting, analyzing, or interpreting data. Researchers use distributed public contributions to gather observations at large scales.
Open-source software: Software whose source code is available under terms permitting inspection, modification, and redistribution. Open-source projects may use crowdsourced contributions, but openness of code is not itself crowdsourcing.
Platform cooperativism: An approach to digital platforms that places ownership and governance in the hands of workers or users. It offers a response to concerns about who controls platforms that mobilize crowds.