Below is a list of projects that rely on
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
. See also
open innovation
Open innovation is a term used to promote an Information Age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have b ...
.
A
*
Adaptive Vehicle Make was a project overseen by
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...
to crowdsource the design and manufacture of a new
armored vehicle.
*
Air Quality Eggs by WickedDevices are open-source hardware Internet of Things pollution monitors that facilitate citizen crowdsourcing of air quality readings
*
Amara is a website that enables crowdsourced translations of videos from a variety of popular video hosting websites. The subtitles created are used to make online video content accessible to a wider audience, including the deaf and hard of hearing, and those who cannot understand the language of the source.
*
Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", it was named after
The Turk, an 18th-century
chess
Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...
-playing "machine".
*The first crowdsourced documentary film is the non-profit ''The American Revolution'', which went into production in 2005, and which examines the role media played in the cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974 through the story of underground, free-form radio station WBCN-FM in Boston. When the project began, by seeking archival contributions from the public, the term "crowdsource" was not in use, and so the film was referred to as the "first open source documentary film". The film is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit Filmmakers Collaborative.
*
Arrange to Settle is an Indian-American film funded through crowdsourcing platforms.
*
Article One Partners, founded in 2008, is a community of technology experts who execute crowdsourced
prior art search by researching and contributing information related to
patents
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
. By submitting research to the online platform, the community members compete for cash rewards, ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.
B
*
Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation (BOSSA), by analogy with the
volunteer computing
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop ...
project
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
* Any software project with an
open Beta test.
* The Netherlands-based
investigative journalism
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, racial injustice, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend m ...
group
Bellingcat that specialises in
fact-checking
Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such che ...
and
open-source intelligence
Open source intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources (overt sources and publicly available information) to produce actionable intelligence. OSINT is primarily used in national security, law enforceme ...
. Bellingcat operate a Discord server of more than 10 000 members with many volunteers among them participating in investigative tasks.
* ''Beyond Words'' was a crowdsourcing project created at the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
in 2017 using the open source codebase Scribe, created by
Zooniverse and
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second-largest public library in the United States behind the Library of Congress a ...
. It asked volunteers to identify cartoons and photographs in the
Chronicling America historic newspaper collections. The purpose was partly to improve research based on these collections.
*
BlueServo was a free website, which crowdsourced surveillance of the
Texas–Mexico border through live camera streaming over the Internet. This evolved from an initiative taken by the
State of Texas
Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...
, which announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas–Mexico border, that would enable anyone with an internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged
illegal immigrants
Illegal immigration is the migration of people into a country in violation of that country's immigration laws, or the continuous residence in a country without the legal right to do so. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upward, wi ...
to
border patrol agents. It was later shut down due to lack of funding.
*''
Britain in a Day'' is a
Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott (born 30 November 1937) is an English film director and producer. He directs films in the Science fiction film, science fiction, Crime film, crime, and historical drama, historical epic genres, with an atmospheric and highly co ...
film, a successor project to ''
Life in a Day,'' and part of the BBC's
Cultural Olympiad, in which people in Britain filmed themselves on 12 November 2011, and submitted video clips online for inclusion in the film.
[Jones, Paul]
"Ridley Scott to help create a portrait of Britain in a Day"
archive
, ''Radio Times
''Radio Times'' is a British weekly listings magazine devoted to television and radio programme schedules, with other features such as interviews, film reviews and lifestyle items. Founded in September 1923 by John Reith, then general manage ...
,'' 5 October 2011.
*''By the People'' is a transcription and tagging crowdsourcing project from the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
. It launched on 24 October 2018. Volunteers can participate anonymously or by making an account. Signed in volunteers can edit other people's transcriptions. Materials are broken into "Campaigns" such as "Letters to Lincoln". "Rosa Parks: In her own words". and "Anna E. Dickinson Papers". Transcriptions are published on the Library of Congress main website, and are available for bulk download once a Campaign is complete.
C
*
California Digital Newspaper Collection In August 2011, the California Digital Newspaper Collection implemented crowdsourced OCR text correction of its digitized historical newspapers; some published as early as 1846 (California statehood 1850). CDNC is a project of the
Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the
University of California, Riverside
The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Riverside, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of Cali ...
. The CDNC is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.
*
Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection. In March 2011, the
Cambridge Public Library in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...
, launched a digital collection of historic newspapers that implements crowdsourced OCR text correction. The freely accessible and keyword searchable database contains newspapers dating back to 1846 when Cambridge was established as a city. The Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection is a project of the
Cambridge Room, the Cambridge Public Library's Archives and Special Collections, and is supported by funding from the
Community Preservation Act.
*
Chicago History Museum
Chicago History Museum is the museum of the Chicago Historical Society (CHS). The CHS was founded in 1856 to study and interpret Chicago's history. The museum has been located in Lincoln Park since the 1930s at 1601 North Clark Street (Chicago) ...
on 14 October 2013, announced a project asking the public to furnish ideas for a future exhibition and reducing the most-often-submitted ideas to one assignment through a series of public votes. According to the American Alliance of Museums, this is the first crowdsourcing project allowing the public to give an exhibition assignment to an American museum.
* Citizen Archivist is a crowdsourcing transcription project at the
National Archives
National archives are the archives of a country. The concept evolved in various nations at the dawn of modernity based on the impact of nationalism upon bureaucratic processes of paperwork retention.
Conceptual development
From the Middle Ages i ...
of the United States. Volunteers can transcribe and tag any digitized content in the National Archives' online holdings. Volunteer coordinators curate "Missions" to help volunteers choose materials that interest them.
*
CitySourced is an enterprise civic engagement platform. CitySourced provides a mobile app for citizens to identify and report non-emergency civic issues, such as public works, quality of life, and environmental issues. The service is part of the e-Government or gov 2.0 movement, which aims to connect government and citizens through the use of technology.
*
Cisco
Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, s ...
Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 were a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won US$250,000.
*
Clickworkers – experimental NASA site
*
Crowdin is a localization management platform for mobile apps, web, desktop software and related assets.
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...
,
Khan Academy,
Minecraft
''Minecraft'' is a 2011 sandbox game developed and published by the Swedish video game developer Mojang Studios. Originally created by Markus Persson, Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java (programming language), Java programming language, the ...
and other used the platform to crowdsource localization.
*
CrowdFlower was founded in 2007 to manage internet crowdsourcing. It is currently the largest provider of crowdsourcing solutions for enterprise with over 450 million tasks completed and 2 million contributors.
*
CrowdMed is a healthcare crowdsourcing platform based in San Francisco, California.
*
Crowdspring is a marketplaces for crowdsourced creative services.
D
*The 2007
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...
Urban Challenge focused on autonomous vehicles, requiring participating teams to create an autonomous vehicle that was able to successfully navigate traffic as well as complex maneuvers including merging, passing, and parking. To successfully complete the challenge, participating vehicles needed to complete a 60-mile course in less than six hours.
*
Dell IdeaStorm is a website launched by
Dell
Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...
on 16 February 2007 to allow Dell "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public.
* The
Democratic National Committee
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the principal executive leadership board of the United States's Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party. According to the party charter, it has "general responsibility for the affairs of the ...
launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they chose.
*
The Daily Minor Planet is the Catalina Sky Survey's NASA-funded citizen science project focused on finding and tracking
near earth asteroids, allowing volunteers to scan through nightly archival images from the 1.5 meter survey telescope at
Mount Lemmon Observatory to discover new
Asteroids
An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...
.
*
DesignCrowd, a crowdsourcing marketplace for graphic design and creative services, launched in February 2008 and helped run a contest for global footwear company HI-TEC. HI-TEC "estimated that using DesignCrowd.com
nd crowdsourcingfor the project saved HI-TEC up to half the costs of going down the usual design route".
DesignCrowd purchased
Brandstack and formed BrandCrowd On 20 December 2011.
*
LEGO Design byME was a service connected with the construction toy
Lego
Lego (, ; ; stylised as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. Lego consists of variously coloured interlocking plastic bricks made of acrylonitri ...
. Launched in 2005 under the name ''Lego Factory'', the service allowed people to design their own Lego models using a computer program, then upload them to the Lego website, design their own box design, and order them for actual delivery. The brand also covers a small selection of products that have been designed by Lego fans, and which were available to purchase as a set.
* The search for aviator
Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from
DigitalGlobe that was made available via
Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful.
[Steve Friess]
50,000 Volunteers Join Distributed Search For Steve Fossett
Wired News, 11 September 2007[Steve Friess]
Online Fossett Searchers Ask, Was It Worth It?
Wired.com, 6 November 2007 Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means.
DigitalGlobe satellite imagery had previously been posted to
Amazon Mechanical Turk after the disappearance of computer scientist
Jim Gray at sea in January 2007, an effort that had attracted much media attention, but not provided any new clues.
*
Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a Web-based project founded in 2000 by Charles Franks that supports the development of e-texts for
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...
by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of October 2011, over 21,000 e-texts have been produced by DP. There are also offshoots (sister sites) such as DP-Europe and DP-Canada.
*
The Doe Network is a 100% volunteer organization devoted to assisting investigating agencies in bringing closure to national and international cold cases concerning Missing & Unidentified Persons.
*
DREAM Challenges is a non-profit initiative to advance biomedical research via crowdsourced competitions. Each challenge provides an infrastructure for participants to build mathematical models and derive novel insight for a research question relevant to the disease context, score performance across participants, and subsequently work together with the top-performing participants to publish key results in an academic journal.
*
Drift bottle experiments are
citizen science experiments in which a surveying organization throws into large bodies of water, bottles containing messages requesting finders of the bottles to return the messages to the organization with a statement of the time and place at which the bottles were found, allowing the organization to determine patterns of water circulation in the bodies of water.
[Madrigal, Alexis C.]
"Found: World's Oldest Message in a Bottle, Part of 1914 Citizen-Science Experiment"
archive
, ''The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 185 ...
,'' 5 September 2012.
*
Duolingo
Duolingo, Inc. is an American educational technology company that produces learning Mobile app, apps and provides Language assessment, language certification. Duolingo offers courses on 43 languages, ranging from English language, English, Fre ...
: With Duolingo users learned a language for free while helping to translate the web via their "Immersion" feature. The Immersion feature was retired in early 2017.
E
Ecomate an Italian ESG B2B platform for calculating the ESG score of companies is crowdsourcing its technical scientific committee now counting more than 80 small consulting firms, non-profits and institutions with different experitse as well as more than 30 individual experts.
*
Emporis
Emporis was a real estate data mining company with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. The company collected data and photographs of buildings worldwide, which were published in an online database from 2000 to September 2022.
Emporis was acquired ...
, a provider of building data, has run the Emporis Community (a website where members can submit building information) since May 2000. Today, more than 1,000 members contribute building data throughout the world.
*The
ESP Game by
Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahn (; born 19 August 1978) is a Guatemalan-American entrepreneur and software developer. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009, and the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo. For these projects and othe ...
(later acquired by Google and renamed
Google Image Labeler) started in 2003 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. This game led to the concept of
Games with a purpose.
*
EteRNA, a game in which players attempt to design
RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself (non-coding RNA) or by forming a template for the production of proteins (messenger RNA). RNA and deoxyrib ...
sequences that fold into a given configuration. The widely varied solutions from players, often non-biologists, are evaluated to improve computer models predicting RNA folding. Some designs are actually
synthesized to evaluate the actual folding dynamics and directly compare with the computer models.
*
Europeana 1914–1918 is a collaboration led by
Europeana with support from The Great War Archive
team at the
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
. A website
is used by the project to encourage the public from all
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...
states to contribute information about
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, especially their family's stories and digitised photographs of their artefacts. In addition to the website,
since 2011
First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
stories have been collected in person from family history roadshow events held in Germany,
Luxembourg
Luxembourg, officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is a landlocked country in Western Europe. It is bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east, and France on the south. Its capital and most populous city, Luxembour ...
, Ireland,
Slovenia
Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a country in Central Europe. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and southeast, and a short (46.6 km) coastline within the Adriati ...
,
Denmark
Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...
, with further events planned in
Cyprus
Cyprus (), officially the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Situated in West Asia, its cultural identity and geopolitical orientation are overwhelmingly Southeast European. Cyprus is the List of isl ...
,
Belgium
Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...
, Italy and more.
The items collected by the project are released on the Internet for use under a
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licence.
*
EyeWire, a game by
Sebastian Seung in which players help an algorithm to segment retinal cells in 3D images of the retina. The aim is to map a mouse retina by extracting individual neurons and their connections to each other.
F
*
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.
*
FamilySearch Indexing is a volunteer project which aims to create searchable digital indexes for scanned images of historical documents. The documents are drawn primarily from a collection of 2.4 million microfilms made of historical documents from 110 countries and principalities. Previously, volunteers installed free software on their home computers, downloaded images from the site, typed the data they read from the image into the software, and submitted their work back to the site. A web-based indexing application was launched in 2014, and the installed version was later retired. The data is eventually made publicly and freely available at familysearch.org (the world's largest nonprofit genealogical organization) for use in
genealogical research. Over one billion historical records have been transcribed to date.
*
Folding@Home is a
distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers.
The components of a distributed system commu ...
project for disease research that simulates
protein folding
Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein, after Protein biosynthesis, synthesis by a ribosome as a linear chain of Amino acid, amino acids, changes from an unstable random coil into a more ordered protein tertiary structure, t ...
, computational
drug design
Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the invention, inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic compound, organi ...
, and other types of
molecular dynamics
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the Motion (physics), physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamics ( ...
. The project uses the
idle processing resources of thousands of
personal computers
A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...
owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding. This is of academic interest with implications for medical research into
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease and the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems wit ...
,
Huntington's disease
Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea, is an incurable neurodegenerative disease that is mostly Genetic disorder#Autosomal dominant, inherited. It typically presents as a triad of progressive psychiatric, cognitive, and ...
, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.
[Austin, Liz]
''NVIDIA foundation awards $400,000 to two teams pioneering cancer research''
(NVIDIA blogs, Retrieved 8 January 2015)
*
Foldit
Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objectiv ...
invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies. Citing
Foldit
Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objectiv ...
, MSNBC's Alan Boyle reported that "video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years," indicating that they "figure(d) out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys."
[Boyle, Alan]
"Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists"
archive
, MSNBC.com, 18 September 2011.
*
Freelancer.com started out in Sweden in 2004 as GetAFreelancer.com, and is now owned by Sydney, Australia-based Ignition Networks. M Barrie, the CEO, claims the company is the largest outsourcing site in the world, receiving more global traffic than competitor elance. The site has 1.5 million users in 234 countries and the average job size is under $200 and it projects a US$50 million in project turnover in the next 12 months. The site takes a 10 percent cut on work allocated.
G
*
Galaxy Zoo is a
citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project began in 2000 a ...
. The project has led to numerous scientific papers and
citizen scientist-led discoveries such as
Hanny's Voorwerp.
*
Gaspy is a petrol price monitoring app of New Zealand.
* "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth – Image Detective" is an interactive citizen science hunt for the Earth location of images taken from space by astronauts since the 1960s. Reviewing 1.8 million photos, individuals submit what they believe to be the location of a given photo, and thus accumulate "points" and "badges" on part of the
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
website.
[ �]
Link to NASA portal
*
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston.
Over the year ...
organized a "Multi-Million Dollar Challenge" to find new, breakthrough ideas for creating cleaner, more efficient, and economically viable grid technologies. The challenge also aimed to accelerate the adoption of
smart grid
The smart grid is an enhancement of the 20th century electrical grid, using two-way communications and distributed so-called intelligent devices. Two-way flows of electricity and information could improve the delivery network. Research is main ...
technologies.
*
Genius, according to their website, is "the world's biggest collection of song lyrics and crowdsourced musical knowledge." It was previously referred to as Rap Exegesis and Rap Genius to decode complex rap lyrics. Now their mission is to "annotate the world".
*
Google Image Labeler was a sort of game where users were asked to label pictures to improve images search results.
*
Gooseberry Patch, has been using crowdsourcing to create their community-style
cookbooks since 1992. Friends, buyers, fans, sales people are all encouraged to submit a recipe. Each contributors' recipe that is selected is recognized in the book and receives a free copy.
*The Great War Archive
was a 2008 project, led by the
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
. It requested members of the general public to digitize any artifacts they held relating to the
First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
and upload them to a purpose-built website. The project successfully released over 6500 items and stories online, which can be freely downloaded and used for education and research. The project was funded by the
Joint Information Systems Committee. In 2011, the team at the
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
received further funding from
Europeana to run a similar crowdsourcing initiative in Germany. From 2012, Europeana extended the project to become a project called "Europeana 1914–1918",
a collaboration led by Europeana, with support from the team at the University of Oxford. There is a website
where the project encourages the public from all
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...
states to contribute information about
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, especially their family's stories and digitized photographs of their artifacts.
* ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
s investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in the United Kingdom. The newspaper created a system to allow the public to search methodically through 700,000 expense-claim documents. Over 20,000 people participated in finding erroneous and remarkable expense claims by members of parliament.
H
* The
Historical Marker Database
The Historical Marker Database (HMdb.org) is an online database that documents locations of numerous historical markers and commemorative plaques in the United States as well as other countries. The database was launched in 2006 by computer progra ...
is an online database that documents locations of numerous historical markers in the United States as well as other countries.
* The
Vancouver Police Department has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD's investigations into the
2011 Stanley Cup Riot. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of 1 July 2011, 101 arrests have been made.
I
*
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
collected over 37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees and their family members in 2006.
[Jessi Hempe]
Crowdsourcing: Milk the masses for inspiration
BusinessWeek, 25 September 2006, Accessed 10 November 2010
*
iNaturalist
iNaturalist is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its web ...
is a citizen science website which allows users to contribute observations of organisms with images, start data-collecting projects, and crowdsources taxonomic identification of observations.
* The
Indian rupee sign was developed in 2010, by using crowdsourcing to select its design through an open competition among Indian residents.
*
InfoArmy is a crowdsourcing platform for business data. Users research online for competitive intelligence information on public and private companies to create iPad and web reports. Current researchers come from a variety of backgrounds and from six continents.
*
InnoCentive, started in 2001, crowdsources
research and development
Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in some countries as OKB, experiment and design, is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products. R&D constitutes the first stage ...
for biomedical and
pharmaceutical companies
The pharmaceutical industry is a Medicine, medical industry that discovers, develops, produces, and markets pharmaceutical goods such as medications and medical devices. Medications are then administered to (or Self-medicate, self-administered b ...
, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive provides connection and relationship management services between "Seekers" and "Solvers". Seekers are the companies searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 185,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone with interest and Internet access can become an InnoCentive Solver. Solvers whose solutions are selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive, which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered with the
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The foundation was created by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller (" ...
to target solutions from InnoCentive's Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social initiatives.
*
Innovation Exchange is an
open innovation
Open innovation is a term used to promote an Information Age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have b ...
vendor which emphasizes community diversity; it sources solutions to business problems from both experts and novices. Companies sponsor challenges which are responded to by individuals, people working in ad hoc teams, or by small and mid-size businesses. In contrast to sites focused primarily on innovation in the physical sciences, Innovation Exchange fosters product, service, process, and
business model
A business model describes how a Company, business organization creates, delivers, and captures value creation, value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-pub ...
innovation..
J
*
Jade Magnet is Asia's largest creative crowdsourcing platform for design solutions like logos, brochures, websites, flyers, animations with a focus on SMEs. It is a Technology platform supporting clients to extract multiple options for creative solutions before making a selection. Additionally as a value add, clients can make use of Delivery Assurance service to manage requirements
K
*
Kaggle
Kaggle is a data science competition platform and online community for data science, data scientists and machine learning practitioners under Google LLC. Kaggle enables users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based d ...
is a platform for data prediction competitions. Kaggle facilitates better predictions by providing a platform for machine learning, data prediction and bioinformatics competitions. The platform allows organizations to have their data scrutinized by the world's best statisticians.
* ''
Katawa Shoujo'' is an open source visual novel created by Four Leaf Studios, a volunteer development team assembled from
4chan and other internet communities.
* The
Katrina PeopleFinder Project used crowdsourcing to collect data for lost persons. Over 4,000 people donated their time after
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina was a powerful, devastating and historic tropical cyclone that caused 1,392 fatalities and damages estimated at $125 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. ...
. It included 90,000 entries.
*
Khan Academy is a non-profit organization founded by educational entrepreneur
Salman Khan which has as its mission to provide a world-class education to anyone for free. It is relying on volunteers to subtitle into the widely spoken languages of the world Khan Academy's substantial collection of educational videos on subjects ranging from math to art history.
L
* At
LibriVox.org, volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then release the audio files back onto the net for free. All the audio is donated back into the public domain.
* ''
Life (Cycle) of the Hong Kong Newt'' is a 2024 Hong Kong short nature documentary directed by local nature photographer Fung Hon-shing. It features the life cycle and survival threats faced by
Hong Kong newt, and is available on YouTube. The project also includes an exhibition of the same name held in April 2024, which covered this documentary, photographs, paintings, and installation art of newt bodies from
roadkill, with the aim of raising public awareness.
* ''
Life in a Day'' is
Kevin Macdonald's 95-minute documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips (4500 hours) submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day.
[Dodes, Rachel]
Life in a Day' Director Aims to Elevate YouTube Videos Into Art"
archive
, edited interview transcript in ''The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
''s "SpeakEasy" section, 22 July 2011.[Watercutter, Angela]
"Life in a Day Distills 4,500 Hours of Intimate Video Into Urgent Documentary"
archive
, ''Wired
Wired may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976
* ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993
* ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017
* "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street''
* "Wired ...
'' magazine, 29 July 2011. Yumi Goto of
''TIME LightBox'' remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it's the first
crowdsourced, user-generated content to hit the big screen."
[Goto, Yumi]
"From Midnight to Midnight: Life in a Day"
archive
, feature of ''TIME'' LightBox (photo editors section), 1 August 2011. This was followed ten years later in 2021 with a new version,
''Life in a Day 2020'', this time featuring over 300,000 submissions.
* The
Living New Deal is a research project and online public archive documenting the scope and impact of the
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression in the United States, Great Depressi ...
on Americans' lives and landscape. The Living New Deal relies on a network of Research Associates and other volunteers, including historians, teachers, students, artists, history buffs, librarians, journalists, and photographers to document New Deal sites throughout the U.S. Anyone can sign up to volunteer.
*
L'Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of
Current TV
Current TV was an American television channel which broadcast from August 1, 2005, to August 20, 2013. Prior INdTV founders Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, with Ronald Burkle, each held a sizable stake in Current TV. Comcast and DirecTV each held a small ...
to pool new and fresh advertising ideas.
M
*
Mapillary is a service for sharing geotagged photos developed by Mapillary AB with the aim to represent not only streets but the whole world. All photos and data are shared using a Creative Commons license, most of the internal software is available under the MIT license and the full API is public.
*
MateCat is a web-based computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool released as open source software under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) from the Free Software Foundation.
* McMaster Postcard Project is a platform created by the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at the
McMaster University Library for crowdsourcing information about an archival collection of historical postcards, providing information on the card's country, province and city of origin, date, and other pertinent information in a "notes" section. Cards were previously categorized only by province, or by country for international cards.
*
Microtask is a company that has developed a software platform for global distribution of short-duration tasks to online workers. The system supports automated quality assurance and provides service-level agreements for task quality and turnaround times.
*
The Milky Way Project is a project that aims to identify
bubbles in the
Milky Way
The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...
with users analyzing infrared images from the
Spitzer Space Telescope.
*
Mindpixel was an online artificial intelligence project to build a knowledgebase of true/false statements, and ran from 2000 to 2005.
*
Moovit is a transit app and platform which makes use of the crowd in two ways: first by letting ''community editors'' add and edit transit data (in locales where official data is not openly available), and second by letting ''app users'' report bus tardiness, crowdedness, etc. to other riders down the line in a similar fashion to Waze.
*
Moral Machine is an online platform that generates moral dilemmas and collects information on the decisions that people think an autonomous vehicle should make between two death outcomes.
*
Mozilla
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...
Common Voice is a project to help make
voice recognition open to everyone. Volunteers can add and verify voice recordings. The database with recordings is available as
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
.
N
*
Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by
Netflix
Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...
, an online DVD-rental service, and was completed in September 2009. The grand prize of $1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which bettered Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%. Netflix provided a training data set of over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies, which is one of the largest real-life data sets available for research. The related forum maintained by Netflix has seen lively discussions and contributed a lot to the success of this competition. A very relevant fact to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams are not only academic researchers, but laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering (virtually learning the problem space from scratch).
*
NotchUp is a company founded in 2008 offering crowdsourced job recruiting to find those who may passively be interested in new opportunities.
*
Numbeo – worldwide studies based on reported consumer prices, perceived crime rates, quality of healthcare and other statistics. As of January 2020, 5,863,289 prices in 9,300 cities entered by 500,170 contributors.
O
*
Old Weather is a web-based effort to transcribe weather observations made by
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the naval warfare force of the United Kingdom. It is a component of His Majesty's Naval Service, and its officers hold their commissions from the King of the United Kingdom, King. Although warships were used by Kingdom ...
ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to
climate model
Numerical climate models (or climate system models) are mathematical models that can simulate the interactions of important drivers of climate. These drivers are the atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. Scientists use climate models to st ...
projections and improve a database of
weather extremes and will be of use to historians in tracking past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
* ''
Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States'' offers 3,700 volunteer-written biographies of suffragists.
*
Online volunteering service (United Nations) is a free service that connects grassroots organizations, international NGOs, local governments, educational institutions and United Nations agencies with thousands of individuals ready to volunteer via the Internet to help address development challenges. The service was launched in 2000 and it quickly attracted thousands of people ready to volunteer online. In 2014 alone, UN Online Volunteers undertook 16,134 assignments.
*
Open Food Facts gathers information and data on food products from around the world.
*
OpenHistoricalMap is a historical map of the world using OpenStreetMap technology and processes.
*
OpenSeaMap is a free nautical chart covering seas, lakes, inland waterways and rivers for the needs of sailors, divers, fishermen and canoeists. The data is collected by crowdsourcing. In a new project OpenSeaMap collect shallow water depths worldwide for making
bathimetric charts.
*
OpenSignal is a project to independently map cell phone carrier coverage and performance. All data is collected from a smartphone application that has been downloaded over 3.5m times worldwide.
*
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...
is a free editable map of the world, which has over 100,000 signed up contributors in mid-2009. Creation and maintenance of geospatial data is a labor-intensive task which is expensive using traditional approaches, and crowdsourcing is also being used by commercial companies in this area including Google and TomTom.
*
Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) mid-2008 launched a crowdsourcing initiative named Doeners.net, meant for people to support the organization's campaigning activities.
P
*
Path launched a project to crowdsource translations for its mobile platform in April 2012.
*
Pepsi
Pepsi is a Carbonated water, carbonated soft drink with a cola flavor, manufactured by PepsiCo which serves as its flagship product. In 2023, Pepsi was the second most valuable soft drink brand worldwide behind Coca-Cola; the two share a long ...
launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States.
*
PhraseApp is a translation management platform that can be used to translate digital content, software, games and apps. It offers an in-context-editor and professional human translation.
* The
Phylo video game invites players to give in to their addictive gaming impulses while contributing to the greater good by trying to decode the code for genetic diseases.
*
Planet Hunters is a citizen science project where users can try to find extrasolar planets identifying patterns in the brightness data of stars retrieved by the
Kepler Space Mission.
*
Prova (Swedish for "to try") launched December 2008 as a crowdsource marketplace that connects businesses with professional ad designers to create print designs, audio ads, video content, and digital designs. Ad designers from all over the world compete for ad creation projects listed on the site.
Q
*
Quantum Moves is a game developed under the
ScienceAtHome umbrella project, designed by
Center for Community Driven Research (
CODER) at
Aarhus University
Aarhus University (, abbreviated AU) is a public research university. Its main campus is located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Group, the Guild, and Ut ...
, which aims to merge theoretical and
experimental quantum research with online community efforts to explore the potential for online
citizen science in this otherwise highly specialized field.
*
Queen Silvia Nursing Award is a crowdsourcing campaign to find and develop national elderly and dementia care services. The campaign runs annually since 2013 in Sweden and in 2014 also in Finland. It is hosted by
Swedish Care International and uses the
Innopinion gamified crowdsourcing platform.
R
*
reCAPTCHA
reCAPTCHA Inc. is a CAPTCHA system owned by Google. It enables web hosts to distinguish between human and automated access to websites. The original version asked users to decipher hard-to-read text or match images. Version 2 also asked users ...
uses
CAPTCHA
Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) ( ) is a type of challenge–response authentication, challenge–response turing test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to de ...
to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. Humans are presented images of the book and asked to provide the corresponding text. Twenty years of ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' have already been digitized.
*
RootMetrics (a.k.a. Root Wireless) uses a mobile client application on various kinds of smartphones to collect data about carrier signal quality and data speeds, then transmits that data to its servers. Consumers can view the crowdsourced data online in the form of color-coded maps that aid purchasing decisions by showing unbiased data from different carriers side by side.
*
Royal British Columbia Museum transcription project allows volunteers to transcribe documents in their collections to assist those papers in becoming more accessible.
S
*
SciStarter is a
citizen science focused site that supports and promotes hundreds of projects that require crowdsourced help. Micro-tasks for volunteer supporters include things such as climatic observations, astronomical observations, image / video / audio capture, image tagging, audio description, data point assessment, etc.
*
Secret London is composed mostly of Londoners who use the site to share suggestions and photos of London. Originally started as a Facebook Group in 2010 in response to a competition to win an internship at
Saatchi & Saatchi, Secret London gained 150,000 members within two weeks. This early popularity prompted its founder,
Tiffany Philippou, to appeal to the community to help build the group a website, which was launched 10 days later.
*
SeeClickFix is a web tool that allows citizens to report non-emergency neighborhood issues, which are communicated to local government, as a form of community activism. It has an associated free mobile phone application. Similar to
FixMyStreet.
*
SESH (social entrepreneurship for sexual health) is a project that uses crowdsourcing to improve public health messaging, tools, and policies. The group has been recognized by the WHO-TDR as one of the leaders in social innovation for health. Individual crowdsourcing projects have created videos promoting HIV testing, videos promoting condom use, images promoting sexual health, and related topics.
*
SETILive SETILive was an online project of Zooniverse (citizen science project), Zooniverse that utilized live participants to analyze radio telescope data in real time to recognize patterns to find extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI's). The project cease ...
is an online project of
Zooniverse. Its goal is to use the
human brain
The human brain is the central organ (anatomy), organ of the nervous system, and with the spinal cord, comprises the central nervous system. It consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. The brain controls most of the activi ...
's ability to recognize patterns to find
extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs).
*
Show us a better way is a British crowdsourcing initiative that ask people a way to improve the communication of public data. The winning idea has been awarded with a £20,000 fund prize.
*
Sightsmap is a sightseeing popularity heatmap overlaid on
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
, based on
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
: the number of
Panoramio photos at each place in the world.
*
Smartling is an enterprise translation management platform that can be used to crowdsource translations for digital content.
IMVU,
Cloudflare, and
Path used the platform to crowdsource website translations.
*
Smartsheet is an online software service and consultancy that enables businesses to track and manage work through online sharing and crowdsourcing methods. The company's Smartsourcing service enables people to anonymously submit and manage all phases of crowdsourced work processing. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is one of the work exchange platforms with which Smartsheet is integrated.
*
Smithsonian transcription center is a crowdsourcing transcription project that invites volunteers to transcribe a wide variety of content in the Smithsonian Institution collections, including from the
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Department of
Paleobiology
Paleobiology (or palaeobiology) is an interdisciplinary field that combines the methods and findings found in both the earth sciences and the life sciences. An investigator in this field is known as a paleobiologist.
Paleobiology is closely ...
, and the Folklife Archives. Materials available for transcription include handwritten documents, audio and video materials.
*
Snapwire is a platform that connects photographers with brands, publishers, small businesses, and creatives around the world looking for specific images that they cannot find through traditional
stock photo services. Photo buyers post a request for authentic photography, set their own price and photographers compete for the posted amount, earn points, level up and receive up to 70% on their photo sales. Buyers get unique images that match their vision, and the winning photographers get paid.
*
Star Citizen is a
multiplayer
A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system (couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...
space trading and combat simulation open development alpha
video game
A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...
project by
Cloud Imperium Games launched in 2012. It is noted for being the highest
crowdfunded video game and one of the
highest-funded crowdfunding projects overall, having raised over US$500 million as of September 2022.
*
Stardust@Home is an ongoing
citizen science project, begun in 2006, using internet volunteer "
clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the
Stardust spacecraft.
*
Student of Fortune is an online service that allows students to submit homework problems for tutors to answer through a tutorial service for a fee. Started by a high school dropout.
*
SunShot Catalyst, run by the
US Department of Energy
US or Us most often refers to:
* Us (pronoun), ''Us'' (pronoun), the objective case of the English first-person plural pronoun ''we''
* US, an abbreviation for the United States
US, U.S., Us, us, or u.s. may also refer to:
Arts and entertainme ...
, is a crowdsourced open innovation program based on a series of prize challenges with the goal of rapid creation and development of products and solutions for the U.S. solar marketplace.
T
*
TopCoder is a crowdsourcing company with a global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers who compete to develop the best solutions for Topcoder customers. Organizations like
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
,
Honeywell
Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...
, and
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
work with Topcoder to accelerate innovation, increase bandwidth, and tap into hard-to-find expertise. On 8 May 2016, Topcoder Announced that its Topcoder Community has grown to more than 1,000,000 registered members.
*
Tomnod crowdsourced the identification of objects and places in satellite images using online map interfaces that engaged many people to each view and tag a small section of a large area on the planet. Projects included searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan, mapping earthquake damage after the
2011 Christchurch earthquake
A major earthquake occurred in Christchurch on Tuesday 22 February 2011 at 12:51 p.m. New Zealand Daylight Time, local time (23:51 Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, 21 February). The () earthquake struck the Canterbury Region ...
,
Malaysia Flight 370, counting refugee camps in Somalia, and the search of the Tunante II. Tomnod has since been retired and is no longer active.
*
Transcribe Bentham is a crowdsourced manuscript transcription project launched in 2010. It is run by
University College London
University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...
's Bentham Project, in association with other UCL partners and the
University of London Computer Centre. The project makes available, via a specially designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's Bentham Papers collection – the unpublished writings of the philosopher
, which run to some 60,000 manuscript folios – which volunteers are encouraged to transcribe. The transcripts are intended to contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of ''
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham'', and are uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository, widening access to the collection. Media coverage has included a feature article in ''The New York Times'', and a broadcast on
Deutsche Welle
(; "German Wave"), commonly shortened to DW (), is a German state-funded television network, state-owned international broadcaster funded by the Federal Government of Germany. The service is available in 32 languages. DW's satellite tele ...
radio. The project was shortlisted for the 2011 Digital Heritage Award, and received an Award of Distinction in the Digital Communities category of the 2011
Prix Ars Electronica. The open-source code for the project's transcription tool is available for reuse and customisation.
U
*
Unilever
Unilever PLC () is a British multinational consumer packaged goods company headquartered in London, England. It was founded on 2 September 1929 following the merger of Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie with British soap maker Lever B ...
used the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign for their snack food brand
Peperami.
[Unilever goes crowdsourcing to spice up Peperami's TV ads](_blank)
''The Guardian''.
*
Ushahidi (
Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see
2007–2008 Kenyan crisis
The 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis was a violent political, economic, and humanitarian crisis in Kenya. The crisis erupted after incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of the 2007 presidential election. Supporters of Kibaki's mai ...
) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a
Google map.
It is also the name of the
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects.
W
*
Waze is a free turn-by-turn GPS application for mobile phones that uses crowdsourcing to provide routing and real-time traffic updates.
*"
We Are The World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition)" is a massively
collaborative
Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. The f ...
charity
Charity may refer to:
Common meanings
* Charitable organization or charity, a non-profit organization whose primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being of persons
* Charity (practice), the practice of being benevolent, giving and sha ...
song and music video produced by Canadian singer-songwriter
Lisa Lavie and posted to the YouTube
video sharing website to raise money for victims of the 12 January,
2010 Haiti earthquake
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic Moment magnitude scale, magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake that struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest (departm ...
. The video was the creation of a
collaboration
Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. The ...
of 57
unsigned or
independent YouTube musicians geographically distributed around the world.
[Textual transcripts of programs on which the CNN videos aired, are found a]
"CNN SATURDAY MORNING NEWS"
(6 March 2010
(6 March 2010
, an
(7 March 2010
. ''The'' ''Tokyo Times'' referred to J Rice's subsequently produced "We Pray for You" video, involving largely the same participants as were in Lavie's video, as an example of a trend to use
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
for
charitable purposes.
[Smart, Richard]
"Crowdsourcing: After Quakebook, We Pray For You"
, ''The Tokyo Times'', 11 May 2011.
*
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing, despite objections by co-founder
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
to the term.
*
Worth1000 is a community focused on creative
contests, occasionally with financial incentives. Original contests invited members to submit manipulated images (typically using
Photoshop) for specific themes, often of a comic nature. Now they have new contests regularly for photo effects (aka manipulated images), photography without effects, illustrations, writing and multimedia. While most contests are run by the website, anyone can apply to post a contest, and people seeking professional creative work like
logo design are encouraged to add financial incentives to their requests for less playful creativity.
X
*
X-Prize is an innovation incentive prize using crowdsourcing mechanisms to tackle ''grand challenges'' that are considered failing as free markets. These represent pressing needs the humanity seeks solutions for, that previously have not been served by real entrepreneurial action.
Z
*
Zooniverse is an online
citizen science platform that uses the active participation of human volunteers to complete projects requiring more subtle reasoning or perception than electronic computer networks. It began as a single astronomy project called
Galaxy Zoo, which launched in 2007 and invited volunteers to classify images of
galaxies from the
Sloane Digital Sky Survey, in order to better understand galaxy morphology. Zooniverse grew from this effort and has diversified into projects in the humanities and other science domains. Humanities projects include Anti-Slavery Manuscripts with
Boston Public Library
The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1848. The Boston Public Library is also Massachusetts' Library for the Commonwealth (formerly ''library of last recourse''), meaning all adult re ...
, and Shakespeare's World with the
Folger Shakespeare Library
The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materia ...
and
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...
. Ecology projects include Snapshot Serengeti, Wildcam Gorongosa and Penguin Watch. Anyone can build their own project on the free Project Builder. Zooniverse, its researchers and volunteers frequently publish research papers
Zooniverse publications
/ref> using the data created by volunteers.
See also
* Comparison of crowdfunding services
* Crowdmapping Examples
* List of volunteer computing projects
* List of grid computing projects
* List of citizen science projects
* List of free and open-source Android applications
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crowdsourcing Projects
*
Society-related lists
Citizen science