30/09/2022
The term “crowdsourcing” was originally coined by “Wired Magazine” writer Jeff Howe in 2006 and is a combination of the words “outsourcing” and “crowd”. Outsourcing traditionally describes transferring work processes from your own company to an external service provider in order to use the economies of scale involved and minimize costs. A crowd generally describes a large number of individuals who form a community.
The principle therefore describes a process in which companies outsource parts of their work processes and fall back on a community of thousands of people (the crowd) instead of individual service providers. Companies, so to speak, work with the “intelligence of the masses”. Individual persons who participate in the crowd are called crowd workers or clickworkers often registered on crowdsourcing platforms.
Crowdsourcing works with or without payment. The best-known example of a project in which crowd workers are not paid is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
It is a crowdsourcing platform everyone can work with and everyone can complement or change. But crowdsourcing is not only divided in regard to finances but also in regard to its different types and application areas.