Crowd Sourcing

CROWD SOURCING

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities to serve specific organizational goals. Online communities, also called crowds, are given the opportunity to respond to crowdsourcing activities promoted by the organization, and they are motivated to respond for a variety of reasons. This precise definition is employed to aid in empirical research on the subject of crowdsourcing and its derivative concepts, though many will continue to blur these distinctions into a single label of “crowdsourcing” to suit their purposes.

Crowd sourcing is the process of getting the requirements from the consumers, grouping them and analyzing these data to finalize on the suitable and effective product. The gathering of information can be done by various methods like through online forms, postal forms, through specially appointed agents for this purpose exclusively, or in small cases a mini voting can be conducted.

In crowdsourcing, the locus of control regarding the creative production of goods and ideas exists between the organization and the public, a shared process of bottomup, open creation by the crowd and top-down management by those charged with serving an organization’s strategic interests. This sharing of power between an organization and the public makes crowdsourcing distinct from similar creative processes. At Threadless, clothing is designed and produced by an open creative process that the crowd undertakes under the guidance of Threadless’s contest rules and requirements, all to serve Threadless’s business interests while rewarding the contributions of winning designers. At InnoCentive, an open call for solutions to tough scientific challenges is combined with challenge-specific rules and solution parameters provided by InnoCentive and the companies that post the challenges in pursuit of their strategic interests. And at Mechanical Turk, workers respond to open tasks that are managed by requesting organizations and designed to serve the organization’s needs while paying a small amount of money to the worker.

CROWD SOURCING PLATFORMS

Social media: Possibly the most recognized platform of them all and is rising very fast because of the increasing influence of social Medias in our life.

Newsletters: One of the oldest ways for crowd sourcing. This method involves giving a form to all houses along with their NEWS papers and requesting the readers to fill it up. They would collect them back the next day through the NEWS paper delivery person.

Form filling: It could be either online or offline, but the goal is to hand out forms to as many customers as possible. For online forms there are so many service providers that could be found online these days, who would allow us to upload our form in their sites and would request the site viewers to fill them out. There are few service providers who would do the same offline too. Of course they all charge high.