crowdpowered

Crowdpowered is an umbrella term used to describe systems, projects, and platforms that derive value from the contributions of a large crowd. Such contributions can be labor, knowledge, data, feedback, or funding. Crowdpowered projects rely on distributed participation to accomplish tasks that would be difficult for a single organization to achieve.

Origin and usage: The concept entered wider discourse in the mid-2000s with the term crowdsourcing popularized by Jeff Howe; since then, crowd-powered approaches have expanded across data collection, problem solving, content creation, and funding.

Mechanisms and models: Crowdpowered systems typically deploy an online platform that recruits participants, assigns tasks, and aggregates outputs. Common models include microtask crowdsourcing for data labeling, citizen science and open innovation challenges for problem solving, and crowdfunding for project financing. Notable implementations include Wikipedia (crowd-edited encyclopedia), OpenStreetMap (crowd-sourced mapping), Zooniverse (crowd science), Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites, and crowd labor marketplaces such as Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Benefits and challenges: Advantages include scale, diversity of input, resilience, and rapid data generation. Challenges involve quality control, incentive design to prevent free-riding, governance and moderation, privacy and security, and potential biases in input.

See also: Crowdsourcing, citizen science, open innovation, crowdfunding, crowd labor.