Crowdsourcing

I came across the term crowdsourcing and wondered how we get to come up with new concepts at the speed of white light. Throw around big words and we all sound clever and highly regarded. I wiki’d it and came up with this:

Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.

The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

Is crowdsourcing only valid when it involves the use of Web 2.0 technology or would this be applicable to writing book chapters as well? Can we regard the guidelines, technical reports, etc generated by the TMForum and GRAPA as crowdsourcing? If so, how does crowdsourcing differ from collaboration?

Just wondering.

Güera Romo
Güera Romo
Güera has many years of experience in business transformation in the engineering, defense, government, banking and telecommunication industries. She has experience in mergers & acquisition, rightsizing, re-deployment of personnel, business process re-engineering, system selection and implementation. Güera holds a BCom Hon (Industrial and Organizational Psychology) degree and is currently pursuing a doctorate that draws on her practical experience of developing human resource capabilities within large corporations.

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