CrowdSourcing

Crowdsourcing is the idea of outsourcing work, usually online, to a group or crowd of people. "Crowdsourcing"  is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'.  The principle behind this concept is that more heads are better than one for any given project.  By using crowds of people, generation of ideas, skills, and quality of content is usually superior resulting in a better product. A great example of this was the creation of the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world, Wikipedia.

Crowdsourcing has five major forms (listed below). Each form involves a crowdsourcer or manager, a crowdmarket and a crowd of people. By choosing the right form of crowdsourcing, you can manage large jobs with thousands of workers or do small jobs that require just a single person. You can create jobs that you carefully monitor and control, or you can let the crowd organize itself and decide how it should do the work.

1.  Crowdcontests - can be used for graphic design, answering questions, testing software, creating films and other creative projects.  For example, say you’re looking for a book cover design, you can solicit a crowd of cover designers and tell them what you want, how much you will pay, and when you need to have it done.  All interested designers will create a finished book cover specifically for you. You’ll receive dozens of different book cover designs, and you can use whichever design you like the best. By doing design this way, you get better quality at a reduced cost, compared to hiring one person.

2. Macrotasks - enable you to get a specific skill for a job or project.  This way you can hire people (a team) from the crowd to work on a single project or task.  Workers communicate over the Internet and are paid by project.  This type of crowdsourcing works good for general business work, web and other forms of design, assistance with writing and editing, and application development.

3. Microtasks - involves breaking large jobs up into tiny tasks and sending the work to a crowd of people. For example microtasks could involve transcribing business cards, medical  records (or other documents), tagging photos and finding business information. Work is done faster, cheaper, and usually with less errors (when validation systems are in place).

4. Crowdfunding - This idea involves asking a crowd of people to donate money to your project. Some examples are getting support for non-profit organizations, raising funds for artistic endeavors, getting cash to companies by offering goods or services, and raising equity for a company.  You find an appropriate crowdfunding platform (site that offers the service you are looking for), set the amount of money, the deadline, and any rewards offered to donors. If 100% of the donations are not raised by the deadline, all money is returned to the donors.  Crowdfunding is mostly used by artists, charities, & start-ups to raise money for their projects.
 
5. Self-organized crowds - Sometimes call Open Innovation, here the crowd organizes itself into teams.  The teams compete to provide the best answer to a challenge.  The winning team is compensated and decides how it is to be divided.  Self-organized crowds are good for creating new products or services, finding and collecting information, processing information and offering judgement, and solving challenges. This type of crowdsourcing can bring people together from different parts of the world and different sectors of business to work together on a project. This is effectively a collection of different fields and levels of expertise that would not otherwise be available to any budding entrepreneur.

Although crowdsourcing provides many ways for businesses and entrepreneurs to get work done  at a reasonable cost and with better results, it also provides earning opportunities for those wanting to become part of the "crowd."  In a follow-up post I am going to discuss ways to earn online by becoming part of the croudsourcing community.