Crowdsourcing. It’s more than just a popular buzzword.

It’s a really useful community knowledge-sharing technique. Think of it as an open call for tasks, information or data collection – mostly through new media technology.

Often, a passionate, informed crowd can much more powerful in generating ideas or offering solutions  than an isolated individual, business or closed community.

Here’s how crowdsourcing works:

1) You discover a problem or a need.
2) You broadcast that need online and call for solutions.
3) An online crowd discovers that call and collectively contributes solutions.
4) You use the crowd’s suggestions to choose a way to fix your problem and reward the individuals who developed that suggestion.
5) In the end, you’ve fixed your problem and the passionate crowd gets that feel-good reward of helping someone out. Everybody wins.

 

Examples from the video:

NotchUp
Cambrian House

Here’s another example of crowdsourcing at work:

Waze is a turn-by-turn navigation system that has been mapped and tagged entirely by its users. It’s a mobile application that aims to make driving a smoother and more social experience by giving users the power to inform other drives of speed traps, traffic delays, accidents and more all while their phones send geo-data to the waze network. Check it out at waze.com.