It is a process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community
At its core, crowdsourcing is distributed problem solving. Business projects are drilled down to micro tasks, which are then distributed to workers with the exact skills to complete them efficiently. With crowdsourcing, an on-demand workforce tackles projects of any scale to deliver high-value output.
With the power of hundreds to thousands of creative minds throughout the world, micro-tasks can be performed simultaneously, and projects can be completed more quickly and cost effectively.
Users–also known as the crowd–typically form into online communities based on the Web site, and the crowd submits solutions to the site or produce its contents.
The crowd can also sort through the solutions, finding the best ones.
These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place–the crowdsourcer