Crowdsourcing is the phenomenon to leverage the potential of individuals and volunteers in the society for various tasks which have manpower requirements, computational requirements or financial requirements. The crowdsourcing platform is relevant for the problems of any domain which require the use of such platform for tapping the crowd as a resource.
In this, the participants are not defined at the start of the work and the call is given to the online community for participation. It started with an article in February 2008, which discusses about crowdsourcing as a distributed problem solving and production model. Now, there are many areas of importance in which it can be used as a tool for developing brilliant applications for the benefits of the society in the field of health, education, information technology, biotechnology, business funding, online activities and research. However. the work on crowdsourcing initiatives where public participates in mass is at a very nascent stage. There are few institutions and industries who are working in the next generation crowdsourcing applications.
Crowdfunding is another related term which uses similar components for developing the application. People have also developed initial crowd-funding applications which have been used for funding start-ups and other socially relevant projects.
What constitutes the crowd? What is the work that crowd can accomplish? How the platform should be developed? Answers to all these questions will be application-specific.
Amazon came up with a Mechanical Turk Platform which was used for doing the trivial tasks by anonymous online workers which were paid for their work. Other examples of crowdsourcing systems that have become popular are Wikipedia, online Tutoring, donation after natural or man-made calamities, collaborative systems and community systems.
A lot has been said by researchers on the huge significance of crowdsourcing systems due to the emergence of the web as a primary source of interaction in the new generation. Most of the time is spent online. Even some of the travel time and free time, which was otherwise not counted in useful time, is now being used for various kinds of online activities. World is a big country of seven thousand million people, there is tremendous scope for this kind of activity. Youth who are not employed or under-employed can engage themselves in crowdsourcing projects. Different kinds of activities can be set up for different levels of users based on their age, background, interest and education level. Overall, it has an immense social relevance and will also help in raising the economic activity in the country.
There are many problems related to Genetics, Social Behaviour analysis, political Analysis and others; that come under Micro and Macro Jobs requiring different skill sets of different kinds. People worldwide are now participating in freelancing activities ranging from programming, web designing, art work, translation, labelling and advertising. As anyone can compete for these jobs, so it comes under crowdsourcing applications. To involve in all these activities, you still need a lot of exposure and skills to compete with the competitors who are bidding for the same job.
If there is an easy to use crowdsourcing platform, then it can be adopted and utilized by various organizations without any hassles. For the users also, it is easier to use similar system for various types of crowdsourcing activities; instead of using different applications for every crowdsourcing project.
Methodology of completing the objectives of next generation crowdsourcing project will be as follows:
(i) To do an extensive survey of the needs and behaviour of people related to crowd resource management.
(ii) To do an interaction with the groups and companies working in this area and find out the relevant parameters of importance
(iii) To Design and Develop a generic framework and get it validated through simulated user studies or peer evaluation
(iv) To design and develop a generic tool or platform for crowdsourcing using web technologies
(v) To deploy and use the tool for few beta testers to test its utility and validity before releasing it for the actual run.
There is a need to have more interest from Venture Capitalists and other funding agencies for supporting different ideas related to this.
It has the potential to solve the problem of (i) jobs for the unemployed people
(ii) helping especially abled people to work from their home on the jobs of their interest
(iii) To find part time jobs for women looking after the family
In the next avatar of crowdsourcing applications, which I will like to name as crowdsourcing 2.0, need to add routine jobs in addition to specialised jobs, low-IQ jobs in addition to high-IQ jobs, blue collar jobs in addition to white collar jobs etc.
Due to the growing penetration of Internet in rural area, growing use of smart phones and growing footprint of digital transactions the constitution of the crowd will now also have significant proportion of rural, low-income and people with basic literacy level.
A new wave of start-ups that can utilize this potential space to come up with new ideas can alter the Indian job crisis. Even Government can come up with a robust crowdsourcing platform that can cater to all the public schemes and other projects run by different agencies at central, state and municipality levels.