Crowdsourcing For Dummies

Chapter 2

Getting to Know the Forms of Crowdsourcing and Crowdmarkets

In This Chapter

Understanding the benefits of each form of crowdsourcing

Getting to grips with the rules of crowdsourcing

You may be as keen as mustard to unleash the awesome power of the crowd. You’ve heard about all that the crowd can do and you want to use it for your business, for your neighbourhood association or for your own purposes. You might want to use the crowd to design an advertisement for your company, to conduct a poll, to search for a lost child or to have a team of skilled workers behind you.

But whoa there! If you want to be a skilled crowdsourcer and use crowdsourcing to really transform your work, your business or your non-profit group, you need to understand the basic properties of the different forms of crowdsourcing before you make a headlong rush into starting a project; you need to understand what they can do for you. Each form of crowdsourcing, because it has its own rules, works in a way that’s slightly different from how the other forms work. Each is best for certain kinds of jobs and less good for others, and each has certain benefits and drawbacks. Therefore, to get the benefits – to transform your work – you need to know which form will best work for you.

The five forms of crowdsourcing ...