Abstract
During the past decade, there were rapid developments on the Internet, computing technologies and wide-spread of location-aware technologies such as GPS and mobile technology. These developments made it easier for people to communicate and share their opinions, views, knowledge, maps and many others throughout software platforms. These technologies have participated in the creation of what is now called Web 2.0. It is a new era of the web where users play an active role in adding contents to the web in a collaborative way, instead of just consuming the web contents. People are sharing social media posts, blog posts, product reviews, ideas, opinions and many more. Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that appeared due to the ability of web users to contribute to the web (Web2.0). This chapter serves as a general overview of crowdsourcing. It investigates various attempts to defining the term, its conceptual models, its benefits and challenges, its applications and exploring some online crowdsourcing systems, software platforms, current and future research avenues.
TopCrowdsourcing Definitions
Crowdsourcing is not a new phenomenon; it has been used in the past in many cases for collecting users’ participations (Howe, J. 2008). But, until now there is no standard agreed upon definition of crowdsourcing. The term was first proposed by Jeff Howe’s in a Wired Magazine article (Howe, J. 2008) and defined as:
the act of a company of institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined and generally large network of people in the form of open call.
After that, there were several other attempts to define it in the literature such as (Ambati et al. 2012 Azzam, T. et al. 2013, Von Ess 2010, Bell, 2009, Doan et al. 2011, Lebraty et al. 2013, Brabham, 2013, Estellés-Arolas et al. 2012, Sharma et al. 2014 and many more). These definitions are different in their view regarding the targeted application of crowdsourcing. The definitions of Crowdsourcing are unified in terms of the general concepts and components, but, targeting different applications.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Crowd: A group of people from geographically distributed locations, different professions, and different cultures.
Crowdsourcing Platform: A more generic online crowdsourcing system, designed for multi-purpose. It can be used for multiple tasks such as product design, rating or voting and data collection tasks. An example is Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Open Source: The act of developing software for free usage and distributions. It is not only for free usage, but also, for free modifications.
Outsourcing: The process used by companies to get a product or a service done externally by other people or companies.
User Incentives: Motivational factors that are used to encourage the crowd to participate in a crowdsourcing activity.
Web 2.0: A set of tools such as social media, wikis and blogs, which made it possible for people to create and share their own contents on the web. The further advancements of using the Semantics and linkage are called Web 3.0.