The Wisdom of the Crowd

The Current-Cambrain House Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing-opening up work threw the Internet to be completed by a large number of people over the Internet who either do it for free or a small fee. Think Wikipedia, Obamapedia or The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).


Open-sourcing is the nearest cousin to crowdsourcing, generally referring to crowdsourced work on software source code that is available for others to change, add to and build on, as with the Linux operating system.

Corporations and non-profits social services organizations are working with free-lancers and consultants beyond their organization to help them with research using crowdsourcing. AssignmentZero launched by Wired in March 2007 is the first attempt by the mainstream media to harness the power of the crowd to find and add to news stories.

InnoCentive will pay people to solve real research challenge for companies like Procter & Gamble.

Weather Crowdsouring is the Next Big Thing? in Citizen journalism or not is hard to say. For some websites and big new stories it would work very well. If you did a history of Chicago's transit system for example crowdsouring would be great but for small quick stories crowdsourcing would only complicated things.

There is also NewAssignment.Net started by NYU Journalisms professor Jay Rosen that will let readers help decide the topics to cover and how by signing up to pursue part of the story. the first story will cover crowsouring. Several newspapers are looking at different ways to turn into Information Centers that collect info from citizens in the streets as well as there reporters.