Intelligent Information Processing - Chances of Crowdsourcing (NII Shonan Meeting 2013-15)

The number of organizations adopting crowdsourcing strategies is growing at an amazing speed. While the term crowdsourcing is being increasingly used in different contexts, it is still ambiguous and lacks a clear definition. Crowdsourcing implicitely includes a social dimension. Social computing was coined in 1994 by Doug Schuler, and its current meaning was come along around the middle of 2000 due to the wisdom of crowds by James Surowiecki, referring to systems that support the gathering, representation, processing, use, and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectivities. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between crowdsourcing and social computing and its potential social impact. We define the main components of a crowdsourcing platform and we provide a classification of challenges that can be solved through crowdsourcing.