History Of Crowdsourcing
The term
“crowdsourcing” was first coined by technology commentator Jeff Howe in a Wired
Magazine article in June 2006. It’s a relatively new term, but the concept
dates back as far as the 1700s. Early editions of the Oxford English Dictionary
were crowdsourced when thousands of volunteers submitted entries on slips of
paper that were compiled into a dictionary.
Another early
example of crowdsourcing is the Longitude Prize, an open contest run by the
British government in 1714. The aim was to find a simple and practical method
for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude, something that had up to
that point, stumped experts. A clockmaker named John Harrison made the most
significant contribution to the solution with his work on chronometers, and is
generally considered the winner.
Widespread use
of the Internet has made launching a crowdsourcing project much easier. The
Internet has enabled us to communicate a problem to crowds of diverse people
from all over the world, who in turn are able to communicate with the problem
owner and each other. Of course, focusing on the problem from a variety of
perspectives increases the likelihood of a workable solution coming to light.
One of the
earliest known examples of a crowdsourcing project that made use of the
Internet is the 1998 Tunnel Journal project in Leidschendam. The Tunnel Journal
was an interactive artwork: an LED display integrated into the walls of a
tunnel along Leidschendam’s main traffic routes. The community could feed the
LED display with their own text messages via the tunnel’s website. The project
was discontinued by Leidschendam councillors because uncensored messages began
reaching the Tunnel Journal’s electronic message board. After revamping the
website in July 2000, a new feature was added – a dynamic filter allowing
visitors to ban texts from the electronic display. Thus the public became its
own filter, preventing derogatory remarks from featuring. Since the launch of
the Tunnel Journal (http://bit.ly/i3zk5G), web-based crowdsourcing has slowly
gained momentum. Crowdsourcing projects of massive scale have been launched in
recent years. This has been possible because of the tools internet connectivity
offers for forming and managing large and diverse crowds, often in short time
frames. Early adopters to the crowdsourcing platform include Thread less
(www.threadless.com) a crowdsourced online t-shirt store, iStockphoto www.istockphoto.com)
for crowdsourced stock photography and InnoCentive (www.innocentive.com). Since
then, the number of crowdsourcing platforms has skyrocketed. Today anything can
be crowdsourced, from tattoo designs to films, medical problems, music and even
engineering problems. Crowdsourcing has emerged as an execution of a far larger
trend influenced by the mass adoption of the Internet. The Internet acts as a
global distribution channel, making it possible to publish information at a
faster pace than ever on a global scale. But what matters far more is the
quality and ability of an idea to stand out and spread. Ideas, and the
subsequent materialisations, are no longer regulated by money or time, but
rather by the value of what’s on offer. An idea that took 10 minutes to come up
with may be just as good, if not better, then an idea that took 10 hours of
ruminating.
The “Rise of the Amateur”: -
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