Defining and Understanding Crowdsourcing

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I read two articles this week on crowdsourcing: Conducting behavioural research on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mason and Suri, 2012) and Wilson's Crowdsourcing and self-instruction: Turning the production of teaching materials into a learning objective (2018). I realized that this is a concept I needed more information on to fully understand crowdsourcing and its uses. Throughout this blog post, I highlight different definitions of crowdsourcing as it is used in different contexts and for different purposes.

In its simplest terms, I understand crowdsourcing as a practice of gathering information into a task or project from a large group of people. 

Mason and Suri defined crowdsourcing as "a job outsourced to an undefined group of people in the form of an open call" and discussed using crowdsourcing to conduct behavioural research by tapping into Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a marketplace for completion of virtual tasks that require humans to perform for low pay).  Amazon's Mechanic Turk (AMT) is so appealing for crowdsourcing because it offers a large and fairly diverse subject pool of workers that are willing and available to participate in research surveys for low pay. The AMT Wikipedia page explains it nicely by describing AMT as a crowdsourcing website owned by Amazon that businesses (requesters) use to hire remotely located 'crowdworkers' to complete tasks (called Human Intelligence Task, HITs) that computers cannot.  

Wilson (2018) defines crowdsourcing as "the practice of acquiring information or task inputs from a large number of people" and discusses crowdsourcing in the context of education, where students evaluate and submit knowledge to a larger project- a crowdsourced assignment. 

Some companies use crowdsourcing to ask questions or put tasks out to a large group in order to receive their input for innovation. This article, 4 Companies That are Killing It with Crowdsourcing  mentions LEGO, that gets some of their product ideas from crowdsourcing. LEGO has a LEGO Ideas Platform, where they invite users to submit their ideas for new Lego sets. The chosen submitter joins the LEGO team in the creation project and also gets royalties on sales. 

This video, Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding Explained, defines crowdsourcing in relation to a few related definitions like crowdfunding, cloud labor, open innovation and crowd creativity:


The more that I learn about crowdsourcing, the more places I find it being used and applied. 

Looking for more information and some real-life uses of crowdsourcing, check out Lauren C's EME6414 Blog and Kevlyn's blog !


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