Below is a list of projects that rely on crowdsourcing. See also open innovation.
Topcoder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size, and small-business clients. Topcoder also organizes the annual Topcoder Open tournament and a series of smaller regional events.
Citizen science is research conducted with participation from the general public, or amateur/nonprofessional researchers or participants for science, social science and many other disciplines. There are variations in the exact definition of citizen science, with different individuals and organizations having their own specific interpretations of what citizen science encompasses. Citizen science is used in a wide range of areas of study including ecology, biology and conservation, health and medical research, astronomy, media and communications and information science.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon. Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site. As of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
Collaborative mapping, also known as citizen mapping, is the aggregation of Web mapping and user-generated content, from a group of individuals or entities, and can take several distinct forms. With the growth of technology for storing and sharing maps, collaborative maps have become competitors to commercial services, in the case of OpenStreetMap, or components of them, as in Google Map Maker, Waze and Yandex Map Editor.
Content creation or content creative is the act of producing and sharing information or media content for specific audiences, particularly in digital contexts. According to Dictionary.com, content refers to "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts" for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Content creation encompasses various activities including maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, article writing, photography, videography, online commentary, social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. In a survey conducted by Pew, content creation was defined as "the material people contribute to the online world".
Geo-Wiki is a platform for engaging citizens and experts in both environmental and socioeconomic monitoring, established in 2009 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). It aids in both, the validation of existing geographical information and the collection of new geographical information through crowdsourcing and citizen science. Using data sources such as satellite imagery, geotagged photographs and the Internet, individual volunteers are able to contribute valuable in-situ data, either by validating existing data and comparing it with satellite imagery, or by collecting new information. Other methods for crowd-sourced data collection in Geo-Wiki include campaigns and games, used as incentives to motivate citizens. Collected data in the platform is freely available.
Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and (2) tapping into the citizenry's collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:
Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Galaxy Zoo project and now hosts dozens of projects which allow volunteers to participate in crowdsourced scientific research. It has headquarters at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from disciplines including astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.
Microwork is a series of many small tasks which together comprise a large unified project, and it is completed by many people over the Internet. Microwork is considered the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line. It is most often used to describe tasks for which no efficient algorithm has been devised, and require human intelligence to complete reliably. The term was developed in 2008 by Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource.
Transcribe Bentham is a crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project, in partnership with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. Transcribe Bentham was launched under a twelve-month Arts and Humanities Research Council grant.
Jade Magnet was an online crowdsourcing platform for creative and marketing support services based in Bangalore, India. It was founded in 2009 by Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra. The company has white label partnerships in Qatar as Mixilion and in Singapore as id8on.
Crisis mapping is the real-time gathering, display and analysis of data during a crisis, usually a natural disaster or social/political conflict. Crisis mapping projects usually allows large numbers of people, including the public and crisis responders, to contribute information either remotely or from the site of the crisis. One benefit of the crisis mapping method over others is that it can increase situational awareness, since the public can report information and improve data management.
Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
Crowdmapping is a subtype of crowdsourcing by which aggregation of crowd-generated inputs such as captured communications and social media feeds are combined with geographic data to create a digital map that is as up-to-date as possible on events such as wars, humanitarian crises, crime, elections, or natural disasters. Such maps are typically created collaboratively by people coming together over the Internet.
Crowdsource is a crowdsourcing platform developed by Google intended to improve a host of Google services through the user-facing training of different algorithms.
Crowdsourced science refers to collaborative contributions of a large group of people to the different steps of the research process in science. In psychology, the nature and scope of the collaborations can vary in their application and in the benefits it offers.
Siobhan Leachman is a New Zealand citizen scientist, open knowledge advocate, and Wikimedian whose work focuses on natural history. In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award.
From the Page is a platform for crowdsourcing transcriptions of records of historical significance, particularly handwritten records that are less easily transcribed by optical character recognition, etc. Archives, special collections, state and provincial archives, public libraries, and digital humanities projects upload scanned documents to FromthePage.com; volunteers then transcribe, review, correct, and comment on the material as needed. FromthePage.com was launched in 2005 by two Rice University computer science alumni with an interest in family history. The founders were inspired in part by "their involvement in Wikipedia's early days". As of 2023, 2.1 million pages had been transcribed by volunteers for 110 participating institutions.
The @bellingcat Discord Server hit 10,000 members this week. It's been so cool to watch the server grow over the past year, from being completely lifeless to today, when dozens of active members share knowledge & information daily.
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(help)One of my rants is against the term "crowdsourcing," which I think is a vile, vile way of looking at that world. This idea that a good business model is to get the public to do your work for free. That's just crazy. It disrespects the people. It's like you're trying to trick them into doing work for free.