What is crowdsourcing? Well, we turn to the crowdsourced online encyclopedia for a definition: Wikipedia defines Crowdsourcing as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to a group of people or community (the crowd), in the form of an ‘open call’.” In its simplest terms, crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model” one which often relies on an active community in order to be successful. Wikipedia is an example of what Clay Shirky calls Cognitive Surplus. Crowdsourcing, as we are discussing it in this chapter, relies heavily on the tools and communication forms made possible by the Internet.
Given that the Internet connects people all over the world through different publishing tools and technologies, the information and ideas that can be published through these channels has become a commodity in itself. Crowdsourcing takes advantage of this by asking and enabling people to share their ideas or creations in exchange for either an emotional or monetary reward.