Did you
know?

crowdsourcing
noun

crowdsource
verb

- the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers

(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

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Crowdsourcing is often used to subdivide tedious work or raise money for start-up companies and charities. This process can occur both online and offline. It combines the efforts of crowds of self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each one on their own initiative adds a small portion that combines into a greater result.

Two editors at Wired Magazine coined the term in 2005 after conversations about how businesses were using the Internet to outsource work to individuals. They concluded that it was like "outsourcing to the crowd," which quickly led to the portmanteau "crowdsourcing."

Crowdsourcing may involve splitting up tedious tasks for crowd-based outsourcing, or it might apply to specific requests, such as crowdvoting, crowdfunding or a general search for answers, solutions, or missing persons.

The Oxford English Dictionary provides one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing. An open call was made to the community for contributions by volunteers to identify all words in the English language and provide example quotations of their usages for each one. They received over 6 million submissions over a period of 70 years.

(adapted from Wikipedia)

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SMUGGLE OWAD into today's conversation

"We used crowdsourcing to develop one of our new products."