I decided I needed to look more thoroughly at a definitive definition of crowdsourcing, as the phenomenon is often confused with other forms of digital interaction.
The burgeoning phenomenon of crowd-sourcing suffers from being relatively new and ill-defined, so I begun my literature inquiry in a search of texts that aim to give a definition of what crowd-sourcing is. To pin down exactly what crowd-sourcing is has proved difficult; Enrique Estelles-Arolas & Fernando Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara published information concluding that between 2006 and 2011 there were 40 different definitions of the term found in 32 articles. 1 The Oxford English Dictionary , Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , and Collins Dictionary all contained very similar definitions of crowd-sourcing. The Oxford English and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary have similar entires around obtaining information and services from a large group of people, but the Collins Dictionary defined it as an ‘unspecified’ group of people, which I think is more appropriate. The Power Thesaurus lists synonyms of crowd-sourcing, which creates further confusion. Synonyms listed were:
Collaboration
Cooperation
Outsourcing
Collaborative Working
Human-based collaboration
Crowd-based outsourcing
Human-based computation
Joint working
Partnership Working
Peer-production
The blurring of lines around its definition are caused by the term being identified with any type of collaborative web-based activity like open innovation and co-creation. Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara examine definitions of crowd-sourcing to establish elementary characteristics and an exhaustive definition. Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara’s study on the definition of crowd-sourcing is well researched by the way of a systematic review of literature. From their study they developed a definition:
Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate bringing their work, money, knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that what the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken.
In the seminal article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing (2006) by Jeff Howe the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined. The article largely consists of crowd-sourcing examples, it is his definition from his blog that is most quoted in literature:
Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.
Daren Brabham is also a long time scholar of crowd-sourcing and offers another well cited definition: ‘Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model…’. 3 In his text, Crowdsourcing, Brabham begins by examining what crowdsourcing is and what it is not. He looks at concepts and theory, participatory culture, issues of crowd-sourcing, and popular examples. He is able to look at crowd-sourcing from different perspectives such as: its contributions in the business area, the technological focus in computer sciences, and the focus on crowd, motivation, and participation in the humanities.
1Enrique Estellés-Arolas and Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, “Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition”, Journal of Information Science,vol. 38, no. 2 (09 March 2012)
2Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: A Definition, Crowdsourcing (blog), (02 June 2006) <http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html> (accessed 05 August 2014).
3Brabham, Daren,”Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases”, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 14, no.1 (2008). pp. 75–90.
Everyone is a Curator 