When the online community (or crowd) is asked for services, ideas or content, it is called crowdsourcing. When a project is too vast and time-consuming for an individual or a small group of individuals to accomplish, they put the proposal online and invite netizens to contribute their ideas, insights and experience to complete it. The task is then divided among those who volunteer to work on the assignment either online or offline. Some projects pay the participants.
Crowdsourcing is essentially social networking used to gather scientific data, to locate missing persons, to raise funds for charity and to finance promising innovations and start-ups (also called crowdfunding).
The American Human Genome Project that mapped the sequences of all the 3 billion base pairs of human DNA was one of the major scientific projects to use crowdsourcing. The manmoth project took the help of researchers across Asia and Europe and managed to finish its task within ten years!
The term was first used in 2006 in an article by Jeff Howe for Wired magazine.
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