1.  Check out a few of these crowdsourcing companies. What are your thoughts? Do you think they are effective? Why or why not?

2.  Which type of leadership is most likely to include the use of crowdsourcing?

3.  Can you think of other areas in businesses that can benefit from the use of crowdsourcing? What are they?

Crowdsourcing is a set of principles, processes, and platforms to get things done that includes putting out an open call to a group and managing the responses and output. Crowdsourcing can be like outsourcing in a bigger way because instead of contracting to one known entity, you are putting a call out to a bigger group, often a global online community, to either get many to participate or to find the person you need by casting a much wider net. 

There are crowdsourcing companies that perform specific types of work such as translations (Gengo, Smartling), transcription (CastingWords), keyword marketing (Trada), even design and marketing work (99Designs, CrowdSpring). Each company operates differently. In the case of transcription or translation, you give work to a company like CastingWords or Gengo, and they in turn put the job out to their “crowd” of workers from around the world. They are like the middleman to helping you get the work done, and their distributed workforce can be less costly to them so they pass on their savings to your organization.