One of the present trends that is picking up pace is CROWD SOURCING.Although it started in the field of Information Technology, it can be readily implemented in any sector,field.
What is Crowd Sourcing?
Crowdsourcing is act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.
In this public(group) is invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out certain tasks in steps, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.
Problems are broadcasted to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions.The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place--the crowdsourcer--and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded.
Some of the advantages of Crowd Sourcing are
- Exploring of problems at comparatively little cost.
- Organization's can tap a wider range of talent.
- By listening to the crowd, organizations gain first-hand insight on customer desires.
- The community may feel a brand-building kinship with the crowdsourcing organization.
In Crowd Sourcing, a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. Another difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public.In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group basis.
The word "Crowd Sourcing" was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 in Wired magazine article.
Don't be under the impression that the Trend has not yet started.
Few examples that I can site here are
- reCAPTCHA is used for digitizing old texts, by providing the text to be read by end users of a CAPTCHA spam filter. reCAPTCHA is helping to digitize over 30 million words per day from the Internet Archive and the New York Times archive. Over 200 million people have helped digitize at least one word using this system.
- The Katrina PeopleFinder Project used crowdsourcing to collect data for lost persons. Over 4000 people donated their time after Hurricane Katrina. It included 90,0000 entries.
Am I part of this TREND?
Yes, I was a part of uTest Bug Battle, Which is a quarterly software testing competition, where thousands of software testers from around the world compete to find bugs in today's most popular web, mobile, desktop and gaming applications. uTest’s business model is based on the idea that crowdsourcing is better suited to web and mobile app testing than other outsourcing models.
