Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services ideas or content by soliciting contribution from a large group of people and especially from an online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, this process can occur both online and offline. The basic concept is to combine the efforts of crowd of volunteers or part-time workers.

There are three types of crowdsourcing

·        Crowd funding: In this type of crowdsourcing, projects are funded by large group of people for example charities etc

·        Crowdsourced Design: In crowdsourced designs projects are funded to design something. Like a web site, logo etc

·        Crowd wisdom: crowd wisdom is using the wisdom and knowledge of crowd. It exist where users ask questions in front of large group of people who are willing to answer like “yahoo answers”.

Uses of crowdsourcing:

·        Getting feedback. Crowdsourcing has been proved best for simple tasks. For example it is a best option for web designers and designers in general to get feedback on their work before making it public. If you are hiring a designer and you don’t afford to hire a professional than simply putting a competition on any crowdsourcing website can be very helpful for talent hunting.

·        Catagorizing inventory products. If you are starting a new shopping website than you can easily do crowd sourcing and get your inventory categorized by paying few cents.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

Advantages:

·        It makes easier to collect the talent and knowledge of all the people in crowd

·        It is a best tool to have understanding of audience and customers

·        Available in low price as compared to the price of hiring a professional

·        It’s a great opportunity that a large number of people always ready to work for you anytime so real time reponse can be obtained

Disadvantages

·        As it is low cost there is a risk that work may also be less credible as compare to professional work

·        Simple projects are easy to communicate as compare to complicated ones. So the task which are above simple in nature may be risky to crowd source

·        There may arise the problem to manage a large number of workers may be waste more time in managing people rather than solution

·        In some cases it may become difficult to collaborate between crowd members

·        Workers can delay or run anytime they want or your design may be re-soled many times