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