Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing (wikipedia.org)

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.

Advantages of using crowdsourcing include lowered costs, improved speed, improved quality, increased flexibility, and/or increased scalability of the work, as well as promoting diversity. Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation. Some forms of crowdsourcing, such as in "idea competitions" or "innovation contests" provide ways for organizations to learn beyond the "base of minds" provided by their employees (e.g. LEGO Ideas). Commercial platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, match microtasks submitted by requesters to workers who perform them. Crowdsourcing is also used by nonprofit organizations to develop common goods, such as Wikipedia.

Source: Crowdsourcing (wikipedia.org)

The people using YouTube to pay for their French chateau

Stephanie Jarvis credits YouTube with saving her vast French chateau. She had bought the 40-room, 16th Century home back in 2005 after pooling resources with a friend.

The people solving mysteries during lockdown

For almost half a century, Benedictine monks in Herefordshire dutifully logged the readings of a rain gauge on the grounds of Belmont Abbey, recording the quantity of rain that had fallen each month without fail.

A Bee C: Scientists translate honeybee queen duets

Scientists using highly sensitive vibration detectors have decoded honeybee queens' "tooting and quacking" duets in the hive. Worker bees make new queens by sealing eggs inside special cells with wax and feeding them royal jelly.

YouTube drive to 'crowd-read' Spain classic Don Quixote

The Royal Spanish Academy has invited people around the world to record short chunks of the classic novel Don Quixote and upload them to YouTube. Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is often described as Spain's most famous novel - and yet few have ever read it.

Life In A Day 2010 Film

Life In A Day is a historic film capturing for future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010. Executive produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald. Soundtrack available here @ http://goo.gl/N9F6O For more information on Life In A Day, visit http://www.yout

Wikipedia hosts India conference amid expansion push

Twenty-one-year-old Abishek Suryawanshi is a Wikimedian. For those who haven't read the relevant explanatory page online, that means he's an avid reader, writer and editor of the online encyclopaedia site Wikipedia.

What is Wikileaks?

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has dominated the news, both because of its steady drip feed of secret documents, but also because of the dealings of its enigmatic front man Julian Assange.

WDYS?

What is this? | Privacy Policy

Website encourages crowds to keep an Eye on Earth

Green EU citizens are being encouraged to contribute their own environmental observations to a website. The Eye on Earth platform is a joint venture between the European Environment Agency (EEA) and Microsoft.

Twitter used to predict box office hits

Micro-blogging service Twitter can be used to predict the future box-office takings of blockbuster films, according to researchers at Hewlett Packard (HP). The computer scientists studied 3 million messages - known as tweets - about 25 movies, including Avatar.

Should we trust the wisdom of crowds?

A problem shared is a problem halved, goes the old saying. But what happens if you share a problem with millions of people? Are you left with a millionth of a problem? Or just lots of rubbish suggestions?

Seti Live website to crowdsource alien life

Announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Los Angeles,the sitewill stream radio frequencies that are transmitted from the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Allen Telescope Array. Participants will be asked to search for signs of unusual activity.

Scientists seek galaxy hunt help

A new project known as Galaxy Zoo is calling on members of the public to log on to its website and help classify one million galaxies. The hope is that about 30,000 people might take part in a project that could help reveal whether our existing models of the Universe are correct.

PC 'rebuilds Rome in a day' using pictures from Flickr

The images were analysed by a modified home PC and detailed models created in less than a day. The team behind the system think it may help preserve heritage sites, ensuring they don't end up swamped by tourists.

Oxford University wants help decoding Egyptian papyri

Oxford University is asking for help deciphering ancient Greek texts written on fragments of papyrus found in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of images have gone on display on a website which encourages armchair archaeologists to help catalogue and translate them.

Old Weather

Help scientists transcribe Arctic and worldwide weather observations recorded in ship's logs since the mid-19th century.

Open science: a future shaped by shared experience

On the surface, it looked as if there was nothing in mathematics that Timothy Gowers couldn't achieve. He held a prestigious professorship at Cambridge. He had been a recipient of the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics. He had even acted as a scientific consultant on Hollywood movies.

OMG. Did you just feel a quake?

Tweets are being used by the US Geological Survey (USGS) to get instant public reaction to earthquakes. The agency is trawling the messages to find out what people felt during a tremor - whether there was a lot of shaking in their area or not.

Mobile app sees science go global

A mobile phone application will help professional and "citizen" scientists collect and analyse data from "in the field", anywhere in the world.The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles - on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species - in a web-based database.

Meet the Wikipedia of the mapping world

If you want to find an up-to-date map of Haiti, then there is only one place to go. It is not Google Maps or any of its competitors. It is the admirable OpenStreetMap.org (OSM), which is being updated even as I write by volunteers all over the world.

Malaysian web users team up for crowd-sourced film

Crowd-sourcing - the practice of enabling many people to help on a single task - is seen as one of the great triumphs of the world wide web. But one project in Malaysia is set to put the wisdom of crowds to the ultimate test, as it attempts to create a full-length feature film.

Blipfoto | Your photo journal

Blipfoto is not just another photo sharing service. At its heart is a simple concept: to upload just one photo each day, add some words if you want, and by so doing build a record of your life, one day at a time.

LHC@home allows public to help hunt for Higgs particle

The Large Hadron Collider team will be tapping into the collective computing power of the public to help it simulate particle physics experiments. Among other pursuits, the effort could help uncover the Higgs boson.

Kevin Macdonald's YouTube movie nearing completion

Many of us would be hard-pressed to remember what we were doing on 24 July this year. But for many YouTube fanatics, amateur film and documentary makers, or even just those curious of a unique movie-making experiment, that day was the chance to produce a small part of cinematic history.

Idle home PCs could raise cash for Charity Engine

Idle computers are being sought to raise cash for charities and contribute to a series of science projects. Charity Engine is a "citizen science" non-profit organisation that taps into the latent computational power of idle computers.

How to save the Earth via the World Wide Web

There are not many websites which literally give you the chance to protect the world. Yet, if you are keen on spending a few moments of your day defending the Earth from an imminent solar attack, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London would like to hear from you.

How to explore Mars and have fun

The US space agency needs your help to explore Mars. The number of pictures returned by spacecraft since the 1960s is now so big that scientists cannot hope to study them all by themselves.

How to crowd-fund your stardom

Kim Boekbinder was not having the best of gigs. Her audience, all 18 of them, probably weren't having a great night either.

Gamification time: What if everything were just a game?

One more step, and a tiny creature will cross the bridge and get to safety. Just one more step - but letters do not match, the fragile structure blows up and the brown mole falls into a digital abyss.

Zooniverse

The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research.

Galaxy hunt draws massive traffic

An online initiative which asks members of the public to classify galaxies recorded unprecedented traffic in its first 48 hours. The venture is a follow-up to the Galaxy Zoo project launched in 2007.

Fake forum comments are 'eroding' trust in the web

Trust in information on the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies to post comments online, say researchers. Fake posters can "poison" debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.

EU could turn to 'crowd sourcing' in cyber crime fight

Millions of internet users across the EU could be encouraged to join the fight against cyber crime if a ground breaking experiment in "crowd sourcing" goes ahead. The director of Europol told peers he wants to get net users directly involved in catching cyber crime gangs.

Crowdsourcing: Turning customers into creative directors

"The office building doesn't look so good from the outside, we don't need it to, so the rent is lower, but inside it's really nice."Ning Li is Made.com's 28-year-old CEO, and we are at the company's London office, on the 11th floor of an unremarkable Notting Hill office block.Made.

Cowbird · Home

We just sent you an email, containing instructions for how to reset your password.

Click listeners test 'filter bubble'

How personalised is the web? That's the question that Click listeners all over the world have been helping us answer.

What is the Citizen Science Alliance?

The CSA is a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process.

CCTV site Internet Eyes hopes to help catch criminals

Internet Eyes will pay up to £1,000 to subscribers who regularly report suspicious activity such as shoplifting. Managing director Tony Morgan said the scheme would reduce crime and help prevent other anti-social behaviour.

Aid agencies 'must use new tools'

The "crowd-sourced" data that comes from victims of natural disasters and conflicts is now a crucial part in disaster management, says a new report. The UN Foundation/Vodafone Foundation Partnership report outlines examples of new technologies that mitigate conflicts and save lives worldwide.

crowdsourcing crowdfunding

Comments