Crowdsourcing: Project Management

“Crowdsourcing is a new phenomenon enabled by evolving information and communication technologies”(Aitamurto, 2011) Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor and outsourcing it to a group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data. The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. In crowdsourcing a client initiates the activity and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis. Crowdsourcing has potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and non-profit use. Crowdsourcing has its benefits, especially if the effort can be a collaborative one. With DesignCrowd, though, crowdsourcing becomes competitive, but the end result is that end-users usually find the best potential output from among very capable designers. We recently learned that DesignCrowd has so far attracted about 108,000 designers, and has doubled its business in the past year. To further add value to the crowdsourcing service, DesignCrowd has launched BrandCrowd, which is a premium logo marketplace for designs that did not win the competitions. Interested clients can browse through these logos or designs, and designers can still monetize those that are chosen. “Crowd-sourcing is a somewhat loaded term, particularly when it comes to impact and public engagement”(Dunn, 2013)The impact that crowdsourcing has had on the field of interface design will focus on impact of a humanities