The word crowdsourcing was first coined in the year 2006 (Howe, 2006). The Miriam-Webster dictionary describes the term as “the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers”. So it considering that the term for it was just coined recently, crowdsourcing must be a new technology, right? Wrong. The idea behind crowdsourcing is actually a lot older than many people think it is. With sites such as Kickstarter and GoFundMe becoming household names, it’s easy to mistake crowdsourcing as the new development in the world of IT.
Crowdsourcing may have been popularized thanks to the Internet, but there have been examples of crowdsourcing even before the Internet. One of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing came about in 1714 with the “Longitude Prizes”. The basic idea of these prizes is when the Britsih government b=needed to find a way to measure the longitude of a ship, they would offer the public a monetary prize to whomever came up with the best methods for measuring. One of best known instances of early crowdsourcing was the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884 when around 800 volunteers catalog the words to create said dictionary (Laxon, 2011). Then in 1916, Planters Peanuts held a contest to see who could make a company logo and the winner was a 14-year old boy who gave us Mr. Peanut (Crowdsourcing.org, 2012).
Crowdsourcing as we know it today did not get its start until the Internet, obviously. One of the first known examples of crowdsourcing that some people point to is the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). Created in 1996, the idea behind HSX were that multiple people could and sell prediction shares of movies and actors with fictional currency. The first site to fully devote itself to crowdsourcing as in crowdfunding was JustGiving.com, a site established in 2000 as a way for people to raise money for charities. However, one of the biggest crowdsourcing sites that is still being used today was founded in 2001. That site is known as Wikipedia.com. With the launch of Wikipedia people were able to freely edit and access an online encyclopedia, causing to grow into one of the largest websites you see today.
Crowdsourcing today comes many forms. Some crowdsourcing as a way to fund projects with Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Other sites use crowdsourcing as a way to create content such as the aforementioned Wikipedia. Other such online crowdsourcing applications have been taken from the early history of crowdsourcing, such as collaboration on solving problems or crowdsourcing as a way of holding contests. Whatever the method of crowdsourcing, it’s a growing field and the history is still just beginning.
Works Cited
"A Brief History of Crowdsourcing [Infographic]." Www.crowdsourcing.org. Crowdsourcing.org.
Lanxon, Nate (January 31, 2011). "How the Oxford English Dictionary started out like Wikipedia".
Howe, Jeff "Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing". Archive.wired.com. 2009-01-04.
By: Henry Hancock
Thanks for this interesting look at the history of crowd-sourcing. Old adages like "two heads are better than one" certainly go back a long way but it was interesting reading the actual practice of crowd-sourcing throughout history. I think that crowd-sourcing traffic data through navigation and traffic applications is a good example of how these old concepts are meeting advancing technology.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting! I, like many others, thought that crowdsourcing was something new in the IT realm, until this class anyway. I thought that the internet sites like gofundme kicked off the beginning of crowdsourcing. However, now that I think about it, NIST (National Institute of Technology) did something similar to your example of measuring the longitude of a ship. They realized that the old encryption standard, DES (Data Encryption Standard) at the time, needed to be replaced. They decided to create an open competition and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) was formed. It is interesting to see just how far back crowdsourcing goes!
ReplyDelete-Allen Morgan
Great post on the history of crowdsourcing. It is really interesting to know how crowdsourcing today is influencing every aspect of business, Internet and everyday life.
ReplyDeleteWe have to admit that the internet is a major role why crowdsourcing has emerged. Specially the existence of web 2.0 which has helped provide great and easy to use platforms to make crowdsouring businesses innovative and beneficial
ReplyDeleteGood to know some of the history behind crowdsourcing. How we have come a long way and yet there is so much more to learn and share.
ReplyDelete