Crowdsourcing - Crowdsourcers

Crowdsourcers

There are a number of motivations for businesses to use crowdsourcing to accomplish tasks, find solutions for problems, or to gather information. These include the ability to offload peak demand, access cheap labor and information, generate better results, access a wider array of talent than might be present in one organization, and undertake problems that would have been too difficult to solve internally. Crowdsourcing allows businesses to submit problems on which contributors can work, such as problems in science, manufacturing, biotech, and medicine, with monetary rewards for successful solutions. Although it can be difficult to crowdsource complicated tasks, simple work tasks can be crowdsourced cheaply and effectively.

Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use. Urban and transit planning are prime areas for crowdsourcing. One project to test crowdsourcing's public participation process for transit planning in Salt Lake City has been underway from 2008 to 2009, funded by a U.S. Federal Transit Administration grant. Another notable application of crowdsourcing to government problem solving is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Researchers have used crowdsourcing systems, in particular Mechanical Turk, to aid with research projects by crowdsourcing aspects of the research process such as data collection, parsing, and evaluation. Notable examples include using the crowd to create speech and language databases, and using the crowd to conduct user studies. Crowdsourcing systems provide these researchers with the ability to gather large amount of data. Additionally, using crowdsourcing, researchers can collect data from populations and demographics they may not have had access to locally, but that improve the validity and value of their work. A project at the University of Minnesota uses crowdsourcing to decipher hundreds of thousands of unpublished Greek papyri.

Artists have also utilized crowdsourcing systems. In his project the Sheep Market, Aaron Koblin used Mechanical Turk to collect 10,000 drawings of sheep from contributors around the world. Sam Brown (artist) leverages the crowd by asking visitors of his website explodingdog to send him sentences that he uses as inspirations for paintings. Art curator Andrea Grover argues that individuals tend to be more open in crowdsourced projects because they are not being physically judged or scrutinized. As with other crowdsourcers, artists use crowdsourcing systems to generate and collect data. The crowd also can be used to provide inspiration for an artist’s work and also to collect financial support for that work.

Additionally, crowdsourcing from 100 million drivers is being used by INRIX to collect users' driving times to provide better GPS routing and real-time traffic updates.