What is Crowdsourcing Platform

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.