List of crowdsourcing projects

• InnoCentive, started in 2001, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, 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.

• The ESP Game by Luis von Ahn (later acquired by Google and renamed Google Image Labeler) 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.

• Since 2004, MoveOn.org has applied crowdsourcing to a variety of challenges related to organizing a political movement including phonebanking, field organizing via house parties, and the creation of ads against opponents.

• reCAPTCHA is used for digitizing old texts, by providing the text (that can't be deciphered properly by OCR software) to be read by end users of a CAPTCHA spam filter. reCAPTCHA is helping to digitize over 50 million words per day from the New York Times archive and Google Books project. Over 400 million people have helped digitize at least one word using this system.

• There is an ongoing effort by the FCC to use crowdsourcing to collect ideas on how to best build out america's broadband infrastructure. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 calls for increased broadband deployment. The site, broadband.ideascale.com [1], allows a citizen to post an idea related to this initiative. Other visitors are invited to vote the ideas up or down. The ideas and comments have been made part of the public record.

• Netflix Prize, is an ongoing open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition is held by Netflix, an online DVD-rental service, and is opened for anyone (with some exceptions). The grand prize of $1,000,000 is reserved for the entry which best shows 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 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).

• Galaxy Zoo 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.

• Smartsheet 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.

• The Guardian'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.

• FamilySearch Indexing, 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 Family History Centers on one of the FamilySearch web sites for use in genealogical research. Over 250 million historical records have been transcribed to date.

• Philoptima, started in 2008, crowdsources research and development on social causes among philanthropists and grant makers. Philoptima provides connection and relationship management services between "Prize Makers" and "Faculty." Prize Makers are the philanthropists and grant makers searching for solutions to critical social challenges. The underlying use of open innovation philanthropy as a universal theory of practice is gaining national and international recognition as a successful way to employ mass collaboration. The Philoptima faculty are the hundreds of registered Philoptima researchers, experts, and specialists who provide their solutions to the prize makers and philanthropists in response to problems posted by prizemakers along with an attendant cash prize and deadline. Anyone who is smart and intuitive can become a member of the Philoptima faculty. Members whose solutions are selected by the grant makers and philanthropists are compensated for their ideas by Philoptima, which acts as manager of the problem>solution>prize process.

• DesignBay, 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 DesignBay.com [and crowdsourcing] for the project saved HI-TEC up to half the costs of going down the usual design route"

• 99designs, the first marketplace for crowdsourced (inaccurately labeled - not really crowdsourcing) graphic design spun out of SitePoint.com in February 2008 and connects clients in need of design work such as logos, business cards, websites and other graphical elements to a community of graphic designers. Designers from all over the world compete for design projects listed on the site.

• 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.

• Dolores Labs provides a crowdsourcing service that enables businesses to process high volumes of simple tasks that are difficult to automate. DL has various sources of people who participate in processing the work, including Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The company's key innovation and contribution to the emerging crowdsourcing practice is in the realm of quality standards using statistical and related technical algorithms and methods.

• Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) mid 2008 launched a crowdsourcing initiative named Doeners.net, meant for people to support the organization's campaigning activities.

• 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.

• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the 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-playing "machine".

• Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer "clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.

• Innovation Exchange is an open innovation 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 midsize businesses. In contrast to sites focused primarily on innovation in the physical sciences, Innovation Exchange fosters product, service, process, and business model innovation.

• 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 choose — whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc.

• The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data on its Red Lake, Ontario, property available to the public over the Internet. They offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, over 80% of which proved productive; yielding 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion. The prize was won by a small consultancy in Perth, Western Australia, called Fractal Graphics.

• In January 2008, the State of Texas announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border, to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents.

• Wikipedia is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing, despite objections by co-founder Jimmy Wales to the term.

• The search for aviator Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe that was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful. Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means.

• Cisco 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.

• Foldit invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies.

• Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a Web-based project launched by Project Gutenberg 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.

• 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.

• The Open Dinosaur Project is a community research project to aggregate published measurements of ornithischian dinosaur limb bones for many different taxa in order to study the multiple evolutionary transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in this group of dinosaurs. The measurements gathered by the community participants will be analyzed by the project leaders and results will be published in an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal. All contributors will be listed as co-authors on the eventual publication.

• Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack food brand Peperami since 1993, but has decided to submit their brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives.

• The Vox Pop Experiment is a crowd sourcing project that allows its audience to ask random individuals questions from the comfort of their computer. Users can vote on different questions and the most popular ones will then be asked to random people on the street. There is a camera crew that takes "on the spot" interviews of individuals randomly. The interviewer has no control over what questions are being asked. The questions being asked are completely under the discretion of the public.

• Pepsi 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.

• In 2009, a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College pioneered a new crowdsourcing framework that charts the steps that corporations can take towards using crowdsourcing in their businesses. The work was done for Yahoo! Inc.

• There is currently an effort to use crowdsourcing to purchase the Pabst Brewing Company. Users pledge money toward the $300 million purchase price and, if the project is successful, receive part ownership of the company and free beer proportional to their donation amount.

• Tongal, founded in 2008, generates video content through collaborative contests. The company serves as an online platform and employs the principles of crowdsourcing by connecting a network of professional and aspiring content creators to businesses that are interested in alternative online advertising. As a platform, Tongal operates based on the assumptions outlined in James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Recent Tongal hosted competitions include an instructional video contest for Kiva[2] and a short film competition for Tyson Hunger Relief[3][4]