List of crowdsourcing projects
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Below is a list of projects that rely on crowdsourcing. See also
open innovation Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have bee ...
.


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Adaptive Vehicle Make Adaptive Vehicle Make was a portfolio of programs overseen by DARPA, of the United States Department of Defense. AVM attempted to address revolutionary approaches to the design, verification, and manufacturing of complex defense systems and vehicle ...
is a project overseen by
DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...
to crowdsource the design and manufacture of a new
armored vehicle Military vehicles are commonly armoured (or armored; see spelling differences) to withstand the impact of shrapnel, bullets, shells, rockets, and missiles, protecting the personnel inside from enemy fire. Such vehicles include armoured ...
. *
Air Quality Egg The Air Quality Egg (AQE) is an Internet of Things platform and hobbyist device for crowdsourced citizen monitoring of airborne pollutants. The device won widespread recognition when it was named one of the best projects on Kickstarter in 2012, a ...
s by WickedDevices are open-source hardware Internet of Things pollution monitors that facilitate citizen crowdsourcing of air quality readings * Amara is a website that enables crowdsourced translations of videos from a variety of popular video hosting websites. The subtitles created are used to make online video content accessible to a wider audience, including the deaf and hard of hearing, and those who cannot understand the language of the source. * Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", it was named after The Turk, an 18th-century
chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...
-playing "machine". *The first crowdsourced documentary film is the non-profit " The American Revolution". which went into production in 2005, and which examines the role media played in the cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974 through the story of underground, free-form radio station WBCN-FM in Boston. When the project began, by seeking archival contributions from the public, the term "crowdsource" was not in use, and so the film was referred to as the "first open source documentary film". The film is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit Filmmakers Collaborative. *
Arrange to Settle ''Arrange to Settle'' is a comedy-drama film written and directed by Ishu Krishna and starring Priya Jagadeesh, Beau Peregino, Ravi Khanna, Susannah Wells, and Nayab Hussain. The plot is about an American-born Indian woman who has to decide bet ...
is an Indian-American film funded through crowdsourcing platforms. *
Article One Partners Article One Partners (AOP) is an online prior art search and intellectual property research crowdsourcing community. AOP was acquired by RWS Group in October 2017 and the AOP Connect crowdsourcing platform is now part of the IP Research group wit ...
, founded in 2008, is a community of technology experts who execute crowdsourced
prior art search Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria fo ...
by researching and contributing information related to patents. By submitting research to the online platform, the community members compete for cash rewards, ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.


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* Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation (BOSSA), by analogy with the
volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...
project
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...
(BOINC) * Any software project with an open Beta test. * The Netherlands-based
investigative journalism Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years res ...
group
Bellingcat Bellingcat (stylised as bellngcat) is a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT). It was founded by British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 20 ...
that specialises in fact-checking and
open-source intelligence Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources (covert and publicly available sources) to produce actionable intelligence. OSINT is primarily used in national security, law enforcement, and busi ...
. Bellingcat operate a Discord server of more than 10 000 members with many volunteers among them participating in investigative tasks. * ''Beyond Words'' was a crowdsourcing project created at the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...
in 2017 using the open source codebase Scribe, created by
Zooniverse Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Gal ...
and New York Public Library. It asked volunteers to identify cartoons and photographs in the
Chronicling America ''Chronicling America'' is an open access, open source newspaper database and companion website. It is produced by the United States National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endo ...
historic newspaper collections. The purpose was partly to improve research based on these collections. * BlueServo was a free website, which crowdsourced surveillance of the Texas–Mexico border through live camera streaming over the Internet. This evolved from an initiative taken by the
State of Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
, which announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas–Mexico border, that would enable anyone with an internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged
illegal immigrants Illegal immigration is the migration of people into a country in violation of the immigration laws of that country or the continued residence without the legal right to live in that country. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upwa ...
to border patrol agents. It was later shut down due to lack of funding. *'' Britain in a Day'' is a Ridley Scott film, a successor project to '' Life in a Day,'' and part of the BBC's
Cultural Olympiad An olympiad ( el, Ὀλυμπιάς, ''Olympiás'') is a period of four years, particularly those associated with the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Although the ancient Olympics were established during Greece's Archaic Era, it was not until ...
, in which people in Britain filmed themselves on 12 November 2011, and submitted video clips online for inclusion in the film.Jones, Paul
"Ridley Scott to help create a portrait of Britain in a Day"archive
, '' Radio Times,'' 5 October 2011.
*''By the People'' is a transcription and tagging crowdsourcing project from the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...
. It launched on 24 October 2018. Volunteers can participate anonymously or by making an account. Signed in volunteers can edit other people's transcriptions. Materials are broken into "Campaigns" such as "Letters to Lincoln". "Rosa Parks: In her own words". and "Anna E. Dickinson Papers". Transcriptions are published on the Library of Congress main website, and are available for bulk download once a Campaign is complete.


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California Digital Newspaper Collection The California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) is a freely-available, archive of digitized California newspapers; it is accessible through the project's website. The collection contains over six million pages from over forty-two million arti ...
In August 2011, the California Digital Newspaper Collection implemented crowdsourced OCR text correction of its digitized historical newspapers; some published as early as 1846 (California statehood 1850). CDNC is a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the
University of California, Riverside The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on in a suburban distr ...
. The CDNC is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. * Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection. In March 2011, the
Cambridge Public Library The Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts is part of the Minuteman Library Network. It consists of a main library and six branches, located throughout the city. Having developed from the Cambridge Athenaeum, the main library buildin ...
in
Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...
, launched a digital collection of historic newspapers that implements crowdsourced OCR text correction. The freely accessible and keyword searchable database contains newspapers dating back to 1846 when Cambridge was established as a city. The Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection is a project of the Cambridge Room, the Cambridge Public Library's Archives and Special Collections, and is supported by funding from the Community Preservation Act. *
Chicago History Museum Chicago History Museum is the museum of the Chicago Historical Society (CHS). The CHS was founded in 1856 to study and interpret Chicago's history. The museum has been located in Lincoln Park since the 1930s at 1601 North Clark Street at the int ...
on 14 October 2013, announced a project asking the public to furnish ideas for a future exhibition and reducing the most-often-submitted ideas to one assignment through a series of public votes. According to the American Alliance of Museums, this is the first crowdsourcing project allowing the public to give an exhibition assignment to an American museum. * Citizen Archivist is a crowdsourcing transcription project at the National Archives of the United States. Volunteers can transcribe and tag any digitized content in the National Archives' online holdings. Volunteer coordinators curate "Missions" to help volunteers choose materials that interest them. * CitySourced is an enterprise civic engagement platform. CitySourced provides a mobile app for citizens to identify and report non-emergency civic issues, such as public works, quality of life, and environmental issues. The service is part of the e-Government or gov 2.0 movement, which aims to connect government and citizens through the use of technology. *
Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 was a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won US$250,000. *
Clickworkers ClickWorkers was a small NASA experimental project that uses public volunteers (nicknamed "clickworkers" on the site) for scientific tasks. Clickworkers are able to work when, and for however long they choose, doing routine analysis that would n ...
– experimental NASA site *
Crowdin Crowdin is a proprietary, cloud-based localization technology and services company. It provides software as a service for commercial products, and it provides software free of charge for non-commercial open source projects, and educational proje ...
is a localization management platform for mobile apps, web, desktop software and related assets.
Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...
,
Khan Academy Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Sal Khan. Its goal is creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos. Its website also in ...
,
Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java (programming language), Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made pub ...
and other used the platform to crowdsource localization. *
CrowdFlower Figure Eight (formerly known as Dolores Labs, CrowdFlower) was a human-in-the-loop machine learning and artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco. Figure Eight technology uses human intelligence to do simple tasks such as transcrib ...
was founded in 2007 to manage internet crowdsourcing. It is currently the largest provider of crowdsourcing solutions for enterprise with over 450 million tasks completed and 2 million contributors. * CrowdMed is a healthcare crowdsourcing platform based in San Francisco, California. *
Crowdspring Crowdspring (written "crowdSPRING", legally crowdSPRING, LLC) is an online marketplace for crowdsourced creative services. Overview Crowdspring was co-founded in May 2007 by Ross Kimbarovsky and Michael Samson. Crowdspring launched its online ma ...
is a marketplaces for crowdsourced creative services.


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*The 2007
DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...
Urban Challenge focused on autonomous vehicles, requiring participating teams to create an autonomous vehicle that was able to successfully navigate traffic as well as complex maneuvers including merging, passing, and parking. To successfully complete the challenge, participating vehicles needed to complete a 60-mile course in less than six hours. * Dell IdeaStorm is a website launched by Dell on 16 February 2007 to allow Dell "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public. * The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they chose. * DesignCrowd, a crowdsourcing marketplace for graphic design and creative services, launched in February 2008 and helped run a contest for global footwear company HI-TEC. HI-TEC "estimated that using DesignCrowd.com nd crowdsourcingfor the project saved HI-TEC up to half the costs of going down the usual design route". DesignCrowd purchased Brandstack and formed BrandCrowd On 20 December 2011. * LEGO Design byME was a service connected with the construction toy Lego. Launched in 2005 under the name ''Lego Factory'', the service allowed people to design their own Lego models using a computer program, then upload them to the Lego website, design their own box design, and order them for actual delivery. The brand also covers a small selection of products that have been designed by Lego fans, and which were available to purchase as a set. * The search for aviator
Steve Fossett James Stephen Fossett (April 22, 1944 – September 3, 2007) was an American businessman and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer. He was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon and in a fixed-wing aircraf ...
, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from
DigitalGlobe DigitalGlobe is an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 14.7 million shares at US ...
that was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful.Steve Friess
50,000 Volunteers Join Distributed Search For Steve Fossett
Wired News ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fran ...
, 11 September 2007
Steve Friess
Online Fossett Searchers Ask, Was It Worth It?
Wired.com, 6 November 2007
Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means.
DigitalGlobe DigitalGlobe is an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 14.7 million shares at US ...
satellite imagery had previously been posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk after the disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray at sea in January 2007, an effort that had attracted much media attention, but not provided any new clues. *
Distributed Proofreaders Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of Marc ...
(commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a Web-based project founded in 2000 by Charles Franks that supports the development of e-texts for
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of October 2011, over 21,000 e-texts have been produced by DP. There are also offshoots (sister sites) such as DP-Europe and DP-Canada. *
The Doe Network The Doe Network is a non-profit organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement to connect missing persons cases with John/Jane Doe cases. They maintain a website about cold cases and unidentified persons, and work to match these with m ...
is a 100% volunteer organization devoted to assisting investigating agencies in bringing closure to national and international cold cases concerning Missing & Unidentified Persons. * Drift bottle experiments are citizen science experiments in which a surveying organization throws into large bodies of water, bottles containing messages requesting finders of the bottles to return the messages to the organization with a statement of the time and place at which the bottles were found, allowing the organization to determine patterns of water circulation in the bodies of water.Madrigal, Alexis C.
"Found: World's Oldest Message in a Bottle, Part of 1914 Citizen-Science Experiment"archive
, ''
The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
,'' 5 September 2012.
*
Duolingo Duolingo ( ) is an American educational technology company which produces learning apps and provides language certification. On its main app, users can practice vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and listening skills using spaced repetition. D ...
: With Duolingo users learned a language for free while helping to translate the web via their "Immersion" feature. The Immersion feature was retired in early 2017.


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* Emporis, a provider of building data, has run the Emporis Community (a website where members can submit building information) since May 2000. Today, more than 1,000 members contribute building data throughout the world. *The
ESP Game The ESP game is a human-based computation game developed to address the problem of creating difficult metadata. The idea behind the game is to use the computational power of humans to perform a task that computers cannot (originally, image recog ...
by
Luis von Ahn Luis von Ahn (; born 19 August 1978) is a German-Guatemalan entrepreneur and a consulting professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is known as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcin ...
(later acquired by Google and renamed
Google Image Labeler Google Image Labeler is a feature, in the form of a game, of Google Images that allows the user to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results. It was online from 2006 to 2011 and relaunched in 2016. Histo ...
) started in 2003 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. This game led to the concept of Games with a purpose. *
EteRNA Eterna is a Swiss luxury watch company founded in Grenchen, Canton Solothurn, on 7 November 1856 by Josef Girard and Urs Schild. The company is now owned by Hong Kong-based Citychamp Watch & Jewellery Group Limited, an investment holding co ...
, a game in which players attempt to design RNA sequences that fold into a given configuration. The widely varied solutions from players, often non-biologists, are evaluated to improve computer models predicting RNA folding. Some designs are actually synthesized to evaluate the actual folding dynamics and directly compare with the computer models. * Europeana 1914–1918 is a collaboration led by
Europeana Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...
with support from The Great War Archive team at the
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
. A website is used by the project to encourage the public from all
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...
states to contribute information about
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, especially their family's stories and digitised photographs of their artefacts. In addition to the website, since 2011
First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
stories have been collected in person from family history roadshow events held in Germany,
Luxembourg Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small lan ...
, Ireland,
Slovenia Slovenia ( ; sl, Slovenija ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Slovene: , abbr.: ''RS''), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, an ...
,
Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...
, with further events planned in
Cyprus Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is ge ...
,
Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
, Italy and more. The items collected by the project are released on the Internet for use under a Creative Commons licence. * EyeWire, a game by
Sebastian Seung Hyunjune Sebastian Seung (English: /sung/ or əŋ ) is President at Samsung Electronics & Head of Samsung Research and Anthony B. Evnin Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science. Seung has done influen ...
in which players help an algorithm to segment retinal cells in 3D images of the retina. The aim is to map a mouse retina by extracting individual neurons and their connections to each other.


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Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures. *
FamilySearch Indexing FamilySearch Indexing is a volunteer project established and run by FamilySearch, a genealogy organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The project aims to create searchable digital indexes of scanned images of historical doc ...
is a volunteer project which aims to create searchable digital indexes for scanned images of historical documents. The documents are drawn primarily from a collection of 2.4 million microfilms made of historical documents from 110 countries and principalities. Volunteers install free software on their home computers, download images from the site, type the data they read from the image into the software, and submit their work back to the site. The data is eventually made publicly and freely available at familysearch.org (the world's largest nonprofit genealogical organization) for use in
genealogical Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kin ...
research. Over one billion historical records have been transcribed to date. *
Folding@Home Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a volunteer computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements ...
is a
distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
project for disease research that simulates
protein folding Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein chain is translated to its native three-dimensional structure, typically a "folded" conformation by which the protein becomes biologically functional. Via an expeditious and reproduc ...
, computational
drug design Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule that acti ...
, and other types of
molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of t ...
. The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of
personal computers A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding. This is of academic interest with implications for medical research into Alzheimer's disease,
Huntington's disease Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea, is a neurodegenerative disease that is mostly inherited. The earliest symptoms are often subtle problems with mood or mental abilities. A general lack of coordination and an uns ...
, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.Austin, Liz
''NVIDIA foundation awards $400,000 to two teams pioneering cancer research''
(NVIDIA blogs, Retrieved 8 January 2015)
*
Foldit Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective ...
invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies. Citing
Foldit Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective ...
, MSNBC's Alan Boyle reported that "video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years," indicating that they "figure(d) out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys."Boyle, Alan
"Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists"archive
, MSNBC.com, 18 September 2011.
* Freelancer.com started out in Sweden in 2004 as GetAFreelancer.com, and is now owned by Sydney, Australia-based Ignition Networks. M Barrie, the CEO, claims the company is the largest outsourcing site in the world, receiving more global traffic than competitor elance. The site has 1.5 million users in 234 countries and the average job size is under $200 and it projects a US$50 million in project turnover in the next 12 months. The site takes a 10 percent cut on work allocated. * FromThePage is a crowdsourcing project for transcribing documents and collaborating on transcriptions with others. FromThePage originally started out as a family history project in 2005, when co-founder Ben Brumfield wanted to collaboratively transcribe family diaries. Now, from the page co-founders and developers Ben and Sara Brumfield have transformed their software into a product that's been used by many prominent organizations, like Harvard University Library, the City of Seattle Municipal Archives, the University of Virginia Libraries, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and more.


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Galaxy Zoo Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scien ...
is a citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The project has led to numerous scientific papers and citizen scientist-led discoveries such as Hanny's Voorwerp. * "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth – Image Detective" is an interactive citizen science hunt for the Earth location of images taken from space by astronauts since the 1960s. Reviewing 1.8 million photos, individuals submit what they believe to be the location of a given photo, and thus accumulate "points" and "badges" on part of the
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...
website.
Link to NASA portal
*
General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...
organized a "Multi-Million Dollar Challenge" to find new, breakthrough ideas for creating cleaner, more efficient, and economically viable grid technologies. The challenge also aimed to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. *
Genius Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for future works, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabili ...
, according to their website, is "the world's biggest collection of song lyrics and crowdsourced musical knowledge." It was previously referred to as Rap Exegesis and Rap Genius to decode complex rap lyrics. Now their mission is to "annotate the world". *
Google Image Labeler Google Image Labeler is a feature, in the form of a game, of Google Images that allows the user to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results. It was online from 2006 to 2011 and relaunched in 2016. Histo ...
was a sort of game where users were asked to label pictures to improve images search results. *
Gooseberry Patch Gooseberry Patch is an American company that publishes cookbooks. It was founded in 1984 by Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin, who were neighbors in Delaware, Ohio, as a mail-order recipe catalog "selling old-fashioned, country-style products." ...
, has been using crowdsourcing to create their community-style
cookbooks A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes. Cookbooks may be general, or may specialize in a particular cuisine or category of food. Recipes in cookbooks are organized in various ways: by course (appetizer, first cours ...
since 1992. Friends, buyers, fans, sales people are all encouraged to submit a recipe. Each contributors' recipe that is selected is recognized in the book and receives a free copy. *The Great War Archive was a 2008 project, led by the
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
. It requested members of the general public to digitize any artifacts they held relating to the
First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
and upload them to a purpose-built website. The project successfully released over 6500 items and stories online, which can be freely downloaded and used for education and research. The project was funded by the
Joint Information Systems Committee Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector. History T ...
. In 2011, the team at the
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
received further funding from
Europeana Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...
to run a similar crowdsourcing initiative in Germany. From 2012, Europeana extended the project to become a project called "Europeana 1914–1918", a collaboration led by Europeana, with support from the team at the University of Oxford. There is a website where the project encourages the public from all
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...
states to contribute information about
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, especially their family's stories and digitized photographs of their artifacts. * ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
s investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in the United Kingdom. The newspaper created a system to allow the public to search methodically through 700,000 expense-claim documents. Over 20,000 people participated in finding erroneous and remarkable expense claims by members of parliament.


H

* The
Historical Marker Database The Historical Marker Database (HMdb.org) is an online database that documents locations of numerous historical markers in the United States as well as other countries. The database was launched in 2006 by computer programmer J. J. Prats. The HMd ...
is an online database that documents locations of numerous historical markers in the United States as well as other countries. * The
Vancouver Police Department The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) (french: Service de police de Vancouver) is the police force for the City of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. It is one of several police departments within the Metro Vancouver Area and is the second ...
has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD's investigations into the
2011 Stanley Cup Riot The 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot was a public disturbance in the downtown core of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on the evening of June 15, 2011. The riot broke out almost immediately after the conclusion of the Boston Bruins' win over ...
. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of 1 July 2011, 101 arrests have been made.


I

* IBM collected over 37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees and their family members in 2006.Jessi Hempe
Crowdsourcing: Milk the masses for inspiration
BusinessWeek, 25 September 2006, Accessed 10 November 2010
*
iNaturalist iNaturalist is a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applic ...
is a citizen science website which allows users to contribute observations of organisms with images, start data-collecting projects, and crowdsources taxonomic identification of observations. * The
Indian rupee sign The Indian rupee sign (₹) is the currency symbol for the Indian rupee (ISO 4217: INR), the official currency of India. Designed by D. Udaya Kumar, it was presented to the public by the Government of India on 15 July 2010, following its select ...
was developed in 2010, by using crowdsourcing to select its design through an open competition among Indian residents. * The Infinity: The Quest for Earth project is a space
MMOG A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or more commonly MMO) is an online video game with a large number of players, often hundreds or thousands, on the same server. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent open world, although there are ...
that accepts contributions of concept art, 3D models, textures, sound effects, musical compositions and programming of standalone prototypes which could help development of the game. By the end of 2009 having contributions of more than 150 modeled ships, buildings and space stations, about 500 musical compositions from which 20% are considered for inclusion in the game. * InfoArmy is a crowdsourcing platform for business data. Users research online for competitive intelligence information on public and private companies to create iPad and web reports. Current researchers come from a variety of backgrounds and from six continents. * InnoCentive, started in 2001, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and
pharmaceutical companies The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...
, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive provides connection and relationship management services between "Seekers" and "Solvers". Seekers are the companies searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 185,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone with interest and Internet access can become an InnoCentive Solver. Solvers whose solutions are selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive, which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to target solutions from InnoCentive's Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social initiatives. *
Innovation Exchange Innovation Exchange Inc. (IX) was an open innovation vendor. IX operates a website which acts as a platform for companies and non-profit organizations to present innovation challenges to a community of innovators. This community is constituted of ...
is an
open innovation Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have bee ...
vendor which emphasizes community diversity; it sources solutions to business problems from both experts and novices. Companies sponsor challenges which are responded to by individuals, people working in ad hoc teams, or by small and mid-size businesses. In contrast to sites focused primarily on innovation in the physical sciences, Innovation Exchange fosters product, service, process, and
business model A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, soci ...
innovation..


J

* Jade Magnet is Asia's largest creative crowdsourcing platform for design solutions like logos, brochures, websites, flyers, animations with a focus on SMEs. It is a Technology platform supporting clients to extract multiple options for creative solutions before making a selection. Additionally as a value add, clients can make use of Delivery Assurance service to manage requirements


K

*
Kaggle Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google LLC, is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Kaggle allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with oth ...
is a platform for data prediction competitions. Kaggle facilitates better predictions by providing a platform for machine learning, data prediction and bioinformatics competitions. The platform allows organizations to have their data scrutinized by the world's best statisticians. * ''
Katawa Shoujo is a bishōjo-style visual novel by Four Leaf Studios that tells the story of a young man and five young women living with varying disabilities. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV-style text box ru ...
'' is an open source visual novel created by Four Leaf Studios, a volunteer development team assembled from
4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...
and other internet communities. * The Katrina PeopleFinder Project used crowdsourcing to collect data for lost persons. Over 4,000 people donated their time after Hurricane Katrina. It included 90,000 entries. *
Khan Academy Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Sal Khan. Its goal is creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos. Its website also in ...
is a non-profit organization founded by educational entrepreneur
Salman Khan Abdul Rashid Salim Salman Khan (; 27 December 1965) is an Indian actor, film producer, and television personality who works in Hindi films. In a film career spanning over thirty years, Khan has received numerous awards, including two Nation ...
which has as its mission to provide a world-class education to anyone for free. It is relying on volunteers to subtitle into the widely spoken languages of the world Khan Academy's substantial collection of educational videos on subjects ranging from math to art history.


L

* At
LibriVox LibriVox is a group of worldwide volunteers who read and record public domain texts, creating free public domain audiobooks for download from their website and other digital library hosting sites on the internet. It was founded in 2005 by Hugh Mc ...
.org, volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then release the audio files back onto the net for free. All the audio is donated back into the public domain. * '' Life in a Day'' is Kevin Macdonald's 95-minute documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips (4500 hours) submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day.Dodes, Rachel
Life in a Day' Director Aims to Elevate YouTube Videos Into Art"archive
, edited interview transcript in ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
''s "SpeakEasy" section, 22 July 2011.
Watercutter, Angela
"Life in a Day Distills 4,500 Hours of Intimate Video Into Urgent Documentary"archive
, ''
Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...
'' magazine, 29 July 2011.
Yumi Goto of ''TIME LightBox'' remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it's the first
crowdsourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
, user-generated content to hit the big screen."Goto, Yumi
"From Midnight to Midnight: Life in a Day"archive
, feature of ''TIME'' LightBox (photo editors section), 1 August 2011.
This was followed ten years later in 2021 with a new version, ''Life in a Day 2020'', this time featuring over 300,000 submissions. * The Living New Deal is a research project and online public archive documenting the scope and impact of the New Deal on Americans' lives and landscape. The Living New Deal relies on a network of Research Associates and other volunteers, including historians, teachers, students, artists, history buffs, librarians, journalists, and photographers to document New Deal sites throughout the U.S. Anyone can sign up to volunteer. * L'Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of
Current TV Current TV was an American television channel which broadcast from August 1, 2005, to August 20, 2013. Prior INdTV founders Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, with Ronald Burkle, each held a sizable stake in Current TV. Comcast and DirecTV each held a smalle ...
to pool new and fresh advertising ideas.


M

*
Mapillary Mapillary is a service for sharing crowdsourced geotagged photos, developed by remote company Mapillary AB, based in Malmö, Sweden. Mapillary was launched in 2013 and acquired by Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms) in 2020. This is one of the ...
is a service for sharing geotagged photos developed by Mapillary AB with the aim to represent not only streets but the whole world. All photos and data are shared using a Creative Commons license, most of the internal software is available under the MIT license and the full API is public. * MateCat is a web-based computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool released as open source software under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) from the Free Software Foundation. * McMaster Postcard Project is a platform created by the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at the
McMaster University Library McMaster University Library is the academic library system for the faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Science, as well as the Michael DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. McMaster al ...
for crowdsourcing information about an archival collection of historical postcards, providing information on the card's country, province and city of origin, date, and other pertinent information in a "notes" section. Cards were previously categorized only by province, or by country for international cards. * Microtask is a company that has developed a software platform for global distribution of short-duration tasks to online workers. The system supports automated quality assurance and provides service-level agreements for task quality and turnaround times. *
The Milky Way Project The Milky Way Project is a Zooniverse (citizen science project), Zooniverse project whose main goal is to identify stellar-wind bubbles in the Milky Way Galaxy. Users classify sets of infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Wide-fi ...
is a project that aims to identify bubbles in the
Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. ...
with users analyzing infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. * Mindpixel was an online artificial intelligence project to build a knowledgebase of true/false statements, and ran from 2000 to 2005. * Mob4Hire is a mobile testing and market research community. They list over 1,100 developers in 86 countries and more than 45,000 testers on 350 carriers in 150 countries. The company won a Meffy award from the Mobile Entertainment Forum for "Most Innovative Business Model". *
Moovit Moovit ( he, מוביט) is an Israel-based mobility as a service provider and journey planner app. It has been owned by Intel through the Mobileye subsidiary since 2020. The company uses both crowdsourced and official public transit data to pro ...
is a transit app and platform which makes use of the crowd in two ways: first by letting ''community editors'' add and edit transit data (in locales where official data is not openly available), and second by letting ''app users'' report bus tardiness, crowdedness, etc. to other riders down the line in a similar fashion to Waze. * Moral Machine is an online platform that generates moral dilemmas and collects information on the decisions that people think an autonomous vehicle should make between two death outcomes. *
Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...
Common Voice Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free database for speech recognition software. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. The t ...
is a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Volunteers can add and verify voice recordings. The database with recordings is available as
opensource Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...
.


N

*
Netflix Prize The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified ...
was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by
Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fi ...
, an online DVD-rental service, and was completed in September 2009. The grand prize of $1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which bettered Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%. Netflix provided a training data set of over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies, which is one of the largest real-life data sets available for research. The related forum maintained by Netflix has seen lively discussions and contributed a lot to the success of this competition. A very relevant fact to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams are not only academic researchers, but laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering (virtually learning the problem space from scratch). * NotchUp is a company founded in 2008 offering crowdsourced job recruiting to find those who may passively be interested in new opportunities. *
Numbeo Numbeo is a Serbian crowd-sourced global database of perceived consumer price index, consumer prices, crime rates, quality of health care, among other statistics. Data on Numbeo is not peer-reviewed, and could be inserted or altered by anyone acce ...
– worldwide studies based on reported consumer prices, perceived crime rates, quality of healthcare and other statistics. As of January 2020, 5,863,289 prices in 9,300 cities entered by 500,170 contributors.


O

*
Open Food Facts Open Food Facts is a free, online and crowdsourced database of food products from around the world licensed under the Open Database License (ODBL) while its artwork—uploaded by contributors—is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ...
gathers information and data on food products from around the world. * Old Weather is a web-based effort to transcribe weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes and will be of use to historians in tracking past ship movements and the stories of the people on board. * OpenSeaMap is a free nautical chart covering seas, lakes, inland waterways and rivers for the needs of sailors, divers, fishermen and canoeists. The data is collected by crowdsourcing. In a new project OpenSeaMap collect shallow water depths worldwide for making bathimetric charts. *
OpenSignal Opensignal is an independent analytics company specialising in "quantifying the mobile-network experience". In August 2014, Opensignal raised a $4 million Series A investment from Qualcomm Ventures, OATV and Passion Capital. Products and servic ...
is a project to independently map cell phone carrier coverage and performance. All data is collected from a smartphone application that has been downloaded over 3.5m times worldwide. * OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the world, which has over 100,000 signed up contributors in mid-2009. Creation and maintenance of geospatial data is a labor-intensive task which is expensive using traditional approaches, and crowdsourcing is also being used by commercial companies in this area including Google and TomTom. *
Oxfam Novib Oxfam is a British-founded confederation of 21 independent charitable organizations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, founded in 1942 and led by Oxfam International. History Founded at 17 Broad Street, Oxford, as the Oxford C ...
(Netherlands) mid-2008 launched a crowdsourcing initiative named Doeners.net, meant for people to support the organization's campaigning activities. *
Online volunteering Virtual volunteering refers to volunteer activities completed, in whole or in part, using the Internet and a home, school, telecenter, or work computer or other Internet-connected device, such as a smartphone or a tablet. Virtual volunteering is al ...
service (United Nations) is a free service that connects grassroots organizations, international NGOs, local governments, educational institutions and United Nations agencies with thousands of individuals ready to volunteer via the Internet to help address development challenges. The service was launched in 2000 and it quickly attracted thousands of people ready to volunteer online. In 2014 alone, UN Online Volunteers undertook 16,134 assignments.


P

*
Path A path is a route for physical travel – see Trail. Path or PATH may also refer to: Physical paths of different types * Bicycle path * Bridle path, used by people on horseback * Course (navigation), the intended path of a vehicle * Desire p ...
launched a project to crowdsource translations for its mobile platform in April 2012. *
Pepsi Pepsi is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by PepsiCo. Originally created and developed in 1893 by Caleb Bradham and introduced as Brad's Drink, it was renamed as Pepsi-Cola in 1898, and then shortened to Pepsi in 1961. History Pepsi wa ...
launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States. * PhraseApp is a translation management platform that can be used to translate digital content, software, games and apps. It offers an in-context-editor and professional human translation. * The Phylo video game invites players to give in to their addictive gaming impulses while contributing to the greater good by trying to decode the code for genetic diseases. *
Planet Hunters Planet Hunters is a citizen science project to find exoplanets using human eyes. It does this by having users analyze data from the NASA Kepler space telescope and the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It was launched by a team led by ...
is a citizen science project where users can try to find extrasolar planets identifying patterns in the brightness data of stars retrieved by the Kepler Space Mission. * Prova (Swedish for "to try") launched December 2008 as a crowdsource marketplace that connects businesses with professional ad designers to create print designs, audio ads, video content, and digital designs. Ad designers from all over the world compete for ad creation projects listed on the site.


Q

* Quantum Moves is a game developed under the ScienceAtHome umbrella project, designed by Center for Community Driven Research (
CODER A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
) at Aarhus University, which aims to merge theoretical and experimental quantum research with online community efforts to explore the potential for online citizen science in this otherwise highly specialized field. * Queen Silvia Nursing Award is a crowdsourcing campaign to find and develop national elderly and dementia care services. The campaign runs annually since 2013 in Sweden and in 2014 also in Finland. It is hosted by Swedish Care International and uses the Innopinion gamified crowdsourcing platform.


R

*
reCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system that enables web hosts to distinguish between human and automated access to websites. The original version asked users to decipher hard to read text or match images. Version 2 also asked users to decipher text or ...
uses
CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA ( , a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. The term was coined in 2003 b ...
to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. Humans are presented images of the book and asked to provide the corresponding text. Twenty years of ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' have already been digitized. * RootMetrics (a.k.a. Root Wireless) uses a mobile client application on various kinds of smartphones to collect data about carrier signal quality and data speeds, then transmits that data to its servers. Consumers can view the crowdsourced data online in the form of color-coded maps that aid purchasing decisions by showing unbiased data from different carriers side by side. *
Royal British Columbia Museum Founded in 1886, the Royal British Columbia Museum (sometimes referred to as Royal BC Museum) consists of The Province of British Columbia's natural and human history museum as well as the British Columbia Provincial Archives. The museum is loca ...
transcription project allows volunteers to transcribe documents in their collections to assist those papers in becoming more accessible.


S

*
SciStarter SciStarter recruits, trains, and equips people for citizen science research projects in need of their help. It was founded by Darlene Cavalier and is a research affiliate of Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society. ...
is a citizen science focused site that supports and promotes hundreds of projects that require crowdsourced help. Micro-tasks for volunteer supporters include things such as climatic observations, astronomical observations, image / video / audio capture, image tagging, audio description, data point assessment, etc. * Secret London is composed mostly of Londoners who use the site to share suggestions and photos of London. Originally started as a Facebook Group in 2010 in response to a competition to win an internship at
Saatchi & Saatchi Saatchi & Saatchi is a British multinational communications and advertising agency network with 114 offices in 76 countries and over 6,500 staff. It was founded in 1970 and is currently headquartered in London. The parent company of the agency gr ...
, Secret London gained 150,000 members within two weeks. This early popularity prompted its founder, Tiffany Philippou, to appeal to the community to help build the group a website, which was launched 10 days later. *
SeeClickFix SeeClickFix is a digital communications system company founded and based in Downtown New Haven, Connecticut. The company runs a website and app which assist users in communicating with local governments about non-emergency issues. SeeClickFix was ...
is a web tool that allows citizens to report non-emergency neighborhood issues, which are communicated to local government, as a form of community activism. It has an associated free mobile phone application. Similar to
FixMyStreet FixMyStreet is a free and open-source software framework by mySociety which enables anyone to run a website for aggregating and reporting street problems, similar to FixMyStreet.com. The United Kingdom FixMyStreet inspired similar sites in other ...
. * SESH (social entrepreneurship for sexual health) is a project that uses crowdsourcing to improve public health messaging, tools, and policies. The group has been recognized by the WHO-TDR as one of the leaders in social innovation for health. Individual crowdsourcing projects have created videos promoting HIV testing, videos promoting condom use, images promoting sexual health, and related topics. * SETILive is an online project of
Zooniverse Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Gal ...
. Its goal is to use the
human brain The human brain is the central organ (anatomy), organ of the human nervous system, and with the spinal cord makes up the central nervous system. The brain consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. It controls most of the act ...
's ability to recognize patterns to find
extraterrestrial intelligence Extraterrestrial intelligence (often abbreviated ETI) refers to hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial life. The question of whether other inhabited worlds might exist has been debated since ancient times. The modern form of the concept emerged ...
s (ETIs). * Show us a better way is a British crowdsourcing initiative that ask people a way to improve the communication of public data. The winning idea has been awarded with a £20,000 fund prize. * Sightsmap is a sightseeing popularity heatmap overlaid on
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
, based on crowdsourcing: the number of
Panoramio Panoramio was a geo-located tagging, photo sharing mashup active between 2005 and 2016. Photos uploaded to the site were accessible as a layer in Google Earth and Google Maps. The site's goal was to allow Google Earth users to learn more about ...
photos at each place in the world. * Smartling is an enterprise translation management platform that can be used to crowdsource translations for digital content.
IMVU IMVU (, stylized as imvu) is an online virtual world and social networking site. IMVU was founded in 2004 and was originally backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, AllegisCyber Capital, Bridgescale Partners, and Best Buy Capital.
,
Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in Sa ...
, and
Path A path is a route for physical travel – see Trail. Path or PATH may also refer to: Physical paths of different types * Bicycle path * Bridle path, used by people on horseback * Course (navigation), the intended path of a vehicle * Desire p ...
used the platform to crowdsource website translations. *
Smartsheet Smartsheet is a software as a service (SaaS) offering for collaboration and work management, developed and marketed by Smartsheet Inc. It is used to assign tasks, track project progress, manage calendars, share documents, and manage other wor ...
is an online software service and consultancy that enables businesses to track and manage work through online sharing and crowdsourcing methods. The company's Smartsourcing service enables people to anonymously submit and manage all phases of crowdsourced work processing. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is one of the work exchange platforms with which Smartsheet is integrated. * Smithsonian transcription center is a crowdsourcing transcription project that invites volunteers to transcribe a wide variety of content in the Smithsonian Institution collections, including from the
National Museum of African American History and Culture The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is a Smithsonian Institution museum located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It was established in December 2003 and opened its permanent home in ...
, Department of
Paleobiology Paleobiology (or palaeobiology) is an interdisciplinary field that combines the methods and findings found in both the earth sciences and the life sciences. Paleobiology is not to be confused with geobiology, which focuses more on the interactio ...
, and the Folklife Archives. Materials available for transcription include handwritten documents, audio and video materials. * Snapwire is a platform that connects photographers with brands, publishers, small businesses, and creatives around the world looking for specific images that they cannot find through traditional
stock photo Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, ...
services. Photo buyers post a request for authentic photography, set their own price and photographers compete for the posted amount, earn points, level up and receive up to 70% on their photo sales. Buyers get unique images that match their vision, and the winning photographers get paid. *
Star Citizen Logo Cloud Imperium Games ''Star Citizen'' is an in-development multiplayer, space trading and combat simulation game. The game is being developed and published by Cloud Imperium Games for Microsoft Windows. An extended retry of unrealized plans ...
is a
multiplayer A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system ( couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...
space trading and combat simulation A space flight simulation is a genre of flight simulator video games that lets players experience space flight to varying degrees of realism. Common mechanics include space exploration, space trade and space combat. Overview Some games in the ...
open development alpha
video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...
project by
Cloud Imperium Games file:Cloud Imperium Games logo.svg, Logo Cloud Imperium Games ''Star Citizen'' is an in-development multiplayer, space trading and combat simulation game. The game is being developed and published by Cloud Imperium Games for Microsoft Windows. An ...
launched in 2012. It is noted for being the highest
crowdfunded Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
video game and one of the highest-funded crowdfunding projects overall, having raised over US$500 million as of September 2022. * Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, using internet volunteer " clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft. * Student of Fortune is an online service that allows students to submit homework problems for tutors to answer through a tutorial service for a fee. Started by a high school dropout. * SunShot Catalyst, run by the
US Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United States. ...
, is a crowdsourced open innovation program based on a series of prize challenges with the goal of rapid creation and development of products and solutions for the U.S. solar marketplace.


T

*
TopCoder Topcoder (formerly TopCoder) is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community s ...
is a crowdsourcing company with a global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers who compete to develop the best solutions for Topcoder customers. Organizations like IBM,
Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...
, and
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...
work with Topcoder to accelerate innovation, increase bandwidth, and tap into hard-to-find expertise. On 8 May 2016, Topcoder Announced that its Topcoder Community has grown to more than 1,000,000 registered members. * Tomnod crowdsourced the identification of objects and places in satellite images using online map interfaces that engaged many people to each view and tag a small section of a large area on the planet. Projects included searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan, mapping earthquake damage after the
2011 Christchurch earthquake A major earthquake occurred in Christchurch on Tuesday 22 February 2011 at 12:51 p.m. local time (23:51 UTC, 21 February). The () earthquake struck the entire of the Canterbury region in the South Island, centred south-east ...
, Malaysia Flight 370, counting refugee camps in Somalia, and the search of the Tunante II. Tomnod has since been retired and is no longer active. * Transcribe Bentham is a crowdsourced manuscript transcription project launched in 2010. It is run by
University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...
's Bentham Project, in association with other UCL partners and the
University of London Computer Centre The University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) was founded in 1968, and was the first supercomputer facility established in London for the purpose of scientific and educational research by all of the colleges of the University of London. ULCC ini ...
. The project makes available, via a specially-designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's Bentham Papers collection – the unpublished writings of the philosopher
Jeremy Bentham Jeremy Bentham (; 15 February 1748 Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates">O.S._4_February_1747.html" ;"title="Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Old Style and New Style dates">O.S. 4 February 1747">Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.htm ...
, which run to some 60,000 manuscript folios – which volunteers are encouraged to transcribe. The transcripts are intended to contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of ''
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham ''The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham'' is a series of volumes under production at the Bentham Project which, when complete, will form a definitive edition of the writings of the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). It includes ...
'', and are uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository, widening access to the collection. Media coverage has included a feature article in ''The New York Times'', and a broadcast on Deutsche Welle radio. The project was shortlisted for the 2011 Digital Heritage Award, and received an Award of Distinction in the Digital Communities category of the 2011
Prix Ars Electronica The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) ...
. The open-source code for the project's transcription tool is available for reuse and customisation.


U

*
Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy dri ...
used the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign for their snack food brand
Peperami Peperami is a pork jerky snack manufactured by Jack Link's. It is similar to BiFi and is manufactured in Ansbach, Germany, and sold in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, across multiples and independent retailers. The snack has mul ...
.Unilever goes crowdsourcing to spice up Peperami's TV ads
''The Guardian''.
*
Ushahidi Ushahidi is an open source software application which utilises user-generated reports to collate and map data. It uses the concept of crowdsourcing serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping" - the combination o ...
( Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a
Google map Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and route ...
. It is also the name of the open source software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects.


W

*
Waze Waze (; he, ווייז, label=Hebrew), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to ...
is a free turn-by-turn GPS application for mobile phones that uses crowdsourcing to provide routing and real-time traffic updates. *" We Are The World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition)" is a massively collaborative
charity Charity may refer to: Giving * Charitable organization or charity, a non-profit organization whose primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being of persons * Charity (practice), the practice of being benevolent, giving and sharing * C ...
song and music video produced by Canadian singer-songwriter Lisa Lavie and posted to the YouTube video sharing website to raise money for victims of the 12 January,
2010 Haiti earthquake A catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest department, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's c ...
. The video was the creation of a collaboration of 57
unsigned Unsigned can refer to: * An unsigned artist is a musical artist or group not attached or signed to a record label ** Unsigned Music Awards, ceremony noting achievements of unsigned artists ** Unsigned band web, online community * Similarly, the c ...
or
independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s * Independ ...
YouTube musicians geographically distributed around the world.Textual transcripts of programs on which the CNN videos aired, are found a
"CNN SATURDAY MORNING NEWS"
(6 March 2010



(6 March 2010

, an

(7 March 2010

.
''The'' ''Tokyo Times'' referred to J Rice's subsequently produced "We Pray for You" video, involving largely the same participants as were in Lavie's video, as an example of a trend to use crowdsourcing for
charitable The practice of charity is the voluntary giving of help to those in need, as a humanitarian act, unmotivated by self-interest. There are a number of philosophies about charity, often associated with religion. Etymology The word ''charity'' or ...
purposes.Smart, Richard
"Crowdsourcing: After Quakebook, We Pray For You"
, ''The Tokyo Times'', 11 May 2011.
*
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing, despite objections by co-founder Jimmy Wales to the term. *
Worth1000 Worth1000 was an photoshopping, image manipulation and contest website. Worth1000 opened on January 1, 2002, and hosted over 340,000 unique images made in theme contests such as "Rejected Transformers", "Invisible World", and "Stupid Protests". ...
is a community focused on creative contests, occasionally with financial incentives. Original contests invited members to submit manipulated images (typically using
Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...
) for specific themes, often of a comic nature. Now they have new contests regularly for photo effects (aka manipulated images), photography without effects, illustrations, writing and multimedia. While most contests are run by the website, anyone can apply to post a contest, and people seeking professional creative work like
logo design A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wordm ...
are encouraged to add financial incentives to their requests for less playful creativity.


X

* X-Prize is an innovation incentive prize using crowdsourcing mechanisms to tackle ''grand challenges'' that are considered failing as free markets. These represent pressing needs the humanity seeks solutions for, that previously have not been served by real entrepreneurial action.


Z

*
Zooniverse Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Gal ...
is an online citizen science platform that uses the active participation of human volunteers to complete projects requiring more subtle reasoning or perception than electronic computer networks. It began as a single astronomy project called
Galaxy Zoo Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scien ...
, which launched in 2007 and invited volunteers to classify images of galaxies from the Sloane Digital Sky Survey, in order to better understand galaxy morphology. Zooniverse grew from this effort and has diversified into projects in the humanities and other science domains. Humanities projects include Anti-Slavery Manuscripts with
Boston Public Library The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, founded in 1848. The Boston Public Library is also the Library for the Commonwealth (formerly ''library of last recourse'') of the Commonwea ...
, and Shakespeare's World with the
Folger Shakespeare Library The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materi ...
and
Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...
. Ecology projects include Snapshot Serengeti, Wildcam Gorongosa and Penguin Watch. Anyone can build their own project on the free Project Builder. Zooniverse, its researchers and volunteers frequently publish research papersZooniverse publications
/ref> using the data created by volunteers.


See also

*
Comparison of crowdfunding services Crowdfunding is a process in which individuals or groups pool money and other resources to fund projects initiated by other people or organizations "without standard financial intermediaries." Mollick, E. (2014). ''The dynamics of crowdfunding: A ...
* Crowdmapping Examples *
List of volunteer computing projects This is a comprehensive list of volunteer computing projects; a type of distributed computing where volunteers donate computing time to specific causes. The donated computing power comes from idle CPUs and GPUs in personal computers, video game co ...
* List of grid computing projects * List of citizen science projects *
List of free and open-source Android applications This is a list of notable applications (''apps'') that run on the Android platform which meet guidelines for free software and open-source software. Advertisement blocking Web browsers Office Suites and synchronisation Co ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crowdsourcing Projects * Society-related lists