Crowdsourcing has boomed in the past few years, with everything from science, disaster relief/recovery and design being crowdsourced. Crowdsourcing as an idea can prove to be effective and efficient - just check out these 4 crowdsourced projects that have utilised people power!
Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopaedia
One of the most well known crowdsourcing projects is Wikipedia - the site that everyone goes to for the "facts" is powered by a dedicated team of Wiki editors who spend their time (for free) trawling through new, updated and changed wiki articles to verify their accuracy. Without crowdsourcing, Wikipedia wouldn't be the world's most loved online encyclopaedia. To get a feel of how large the crowd is, check out these numbers!
There are more than 76,000 active contributors working on more than 31,000,000 articles in 285 languages. As of today, there are 4,511,932 articles in English.
NASA Z-2 Spacesuit
When NASA required a new design for it's Mars-bound Z-2 spacesuit, it looked to the international community for inspiration and ultimately the final design choice. The design contest resulted in 3 designs - which were then voted on by the public. NASA relied on crowdsourcing for the votes and the results show how effective this was.
After 233,431 total votes were cast, the "Technology" option has won NASA's Z-2 Spacesuit design challenge with just over 63% of the total vote.
reCAPTCHA
Everyone hates CAPTCHA's - those annoying images used to stop spam on web forms - but reCAPTCHA has an ulterior motive, now owned by Google reCAPTCHA presents two words to users, one to stop spam and the other a scanned word from a hard copy book/newspaper. The project has now crowdsourced the digitisation of more than 13 million articles from the NY Times, dating from 1851 to the present day as well as a large chunk of books on the Google Books service.
Play to Cure: Genes in Space
Play to Cure: Genes in Space is a free mobile application that utilised crowdsourcing or the collective force of players to analyse real genetic data and find a cure for cancer. By playing Genes in Space the crowd analyses large amounts of genetic data - this data can then be used to develop new life saving treatments.
Malaysia Flight 370 (MH370) Search
When news spread of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, there were people putting their collective hands up around the globe to help the search. But how does a global community help find a plane that was lost in the middle of the ocean? The answer? Crowdsourcing! A Colorado satellite company launched a platform to crowdsource the search, getting the public to help analyse high-resolution images for signs of flight MH370.
Timessquare.com Logo Design
When TimesSquare.com needed a new logo for their website, they looked no further than DesignCrowd. Putting their faith in DesignCrowd's community of graphic designers paid off big time, with the crowdsourced logo that was chosen being a beautiful representation of TimesSquare "The Crossroads of the World”! The logo contest was a huge success with nearly 6 thousand designs submitted from nearly one and half thousand designers.
Can you think of anything weird, whacky or generally out there that has been crowdsourced? If so, let us know in the comments.
Written by DesignCrowd on Monday, May 12, 2014
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.
