List of crowdsourcing projects

Below is a list of projects that rely on crowdsourcing.

#

• 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.

A

• 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".

• Australian Historic Newspapers provided by the National Library of Australia encourages members of the public to correct/fix up/improve the electronically translated (OCR) text of old newspapers. This means the full-text search capability is instantly improved for everyone. The service was released in August 2008 and by March 2010 over 12 million lines of text had been improved by thousands of public users. This is the first library project in the world that has undertaken crowdsourcing on a large scale. The leader of the project Rose Holley is an advocate of using crowdsourcing to help libraries and archives expose and improve digital resources and has written articles about the australian newspaper achievements and tips for libraries on how to crowdsource effectively.

B

• Brandsupply is a Dutch marketplace for graphic design based on the crowdsourcing principle. Brandsupply connects companies and designers in the field of graphic designs such as logo's, websites and other graphical design. Companies are placing design pitches. Designers can join them.

• Brainrack allows students worldwide the opportunity to support companies by providing ideas and solutions consisting of 3-5 pages. Companies that face certain problems or challenges provide approximately $5,000 of prize money that is divided amongst the top 15 ideas.

C

• 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.

• Colnect, originally founded in 2003, is a collectibles web-site that employs crowd-sourcing to upload catalog items, create new collectible categories, and add language translations to the site. More than 45 languages and hundreds of thousands of catalog items have been added using this method.

• The response by the Conservatives to the United Kingdom's 2010 Budget will be crowdsourced.

• In 2010, student network BBNM launched CrowdConsulting, a platform where students from BBNM Member Universities can contribute to solving actual business problems.

• CrowdSpring] is a website where designers compete over logo contests and other design work. crowdSPRING is a company based in Chicago.

D

• 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.

• 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"

• 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. DigitalGlobe 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 (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.

• 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.

E

• 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 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.

F

• Facebook 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, 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.

• There is an ongoing effort by United States Federal Communications Commission (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 [3], 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.

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

• 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.

G

• 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.

• GeniusRocket is a creative crowdsourcing advertising agency that fulfills creative needs with an online community of thousands of artists from around the world. It crowdsources a wide range of creative media like ideation, copywriting, graphic design, web design, video production and animation. GeniusRocket employs the "wisdom of the crowd" of creative professionals to deliver quality work for a fraction of the cost, while also providing opportunities for creative professionals to work with both profit and non-profit companies, ranging from start-up to Fortune 500 companies alike. Notable companies include H.J. Heinz Company, PepsiCo, and South by Southwest (SXSW).. GeniusRocket was founded in 2007 and is based in Bethesda, Maryland.

• 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.

• Gooseberry Patch, has been using crowd-sourcing to create their community-style cookbooks 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.

• 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.

• 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.

I

• The Infinity: The Quest for Earth MMOG project does not accept monetary donations, only contributions of concept art, 3D models, textures, sound effects, musical compositions and sometimes even 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Improv Everywhere is a performance art group based in New York and was started in 2001 by Charlie Todd. The group carries out amusing pranks in the public scene that they call "missions" to entertain their audience. The stated goal of these missions is to cause scenes of "chaos and joy."

K

• 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.
• Kaggle is 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.

L

• Learning to Love You More is a website that posts project assignments by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, which the general public attempts to complete and share on the site. Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience. However, On May 1st 2009, assignments were halted, and submissions were no longer accepted. However, the website still exists, and serves as an archive of the past projects.

• Lawn Mowing Online is a unique service in that instead of the traditional approach of using skilled laborers to mow lawns they offer the jobs to a large group of local individuals through an open call. This has allowed them to regularly mow lawns with just a day's notice over 1,000 miles away and have given over 200 people (as of April 2010) the opportunity to earn semi-regular income while providing services much cheaper than a traditional lawn care service.

M

• 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.

• Mechanical Olympics (mechanicalolympics.org) is a crowdsourced version of the Olympic Games, where any person can do their own interpretation of an Olympic performance. They film a video and upload it via Youtube. Mechanical Olympians are encouraged to create their own interpretations of Olympic performances. Some are funny, abstract, or absurd, while others are mundane, literal translations of a sporting event. Blog viewers then vote, on the blog site, on the winners of each division during the Olympic season. Winners receive a monetary prize, and are typically the most funny or clever of the submissions.

• Mob4Hire is the world's largest mobile testing and market research community. They currently list over 1,100 developers in 86 countries and more than 45,000 testers on 350 carriers in 150 countries. The company recently won a Meffy award from the Mobile Entertainment Forum for 'Most Innovative Business Model'.

• MusikPitch is the first site for crowdsourcing custom songs and music compositions. Created by Scott McIntosh, it allows anyone seeking custom songs for film underscores, video background music, advertising jingles, branding music, or gift songs to launch a music contest. The person or company seeking music then describes what they need and sets the price they are willing to pay. Songwriters and composers around the world compete to win the prize by composing completed custom songs for the projects. Songs can be previously written in cases such as background music where no lyrics are needed. Most songs, however, are custom written specifically for the contests.

• My Frienemies is an online crowdsourcing project and/or social networking site created by Angie Waller, and it allows you socialize with users who "pretend to like the same people as you". It allows you to connect with people who share frienemies with you. The purpose of this website is not to dwell on the negative, but rather to foster new friendships based on mutual dislikes, annoyances and disappointments. You make friends with people with similar dislikes, annoyances, and disapppointments. It claims the more frenemies you have, the more friends you can make. All information shared between members is anonymous and unavailable to the public.

N

• Napkin Labs is a Boulder-based social innovation start-up that allows companies to engage in collaborative, dynamic, and real time conversations with a community of expert consumers to generate innovative ideas about products and services. Napkin Labs uses a complex algorithm to track all contributions in the project space so that each and every users is compensated based on how much their ideas influenced the final project.

• Netflix Prize, 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, an online DVD-rental service, and was completed in September 2009. The grand prize of $1,000,000 was 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).

• NotchUp Inc. is a Silicon Valley based start-up that is first to offer an on-demand recruiting service that uses crowdsourcing combined with social media and an advanced web-based technology platform. NotchUp is a privately held company headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

O

• One Billion Minds, founded in 2009, mission is to engage a billion young people to change the world by solving real problems posed by Corporations and Non Profits. It is a powerful open innovation platform connecting Students and Alumni from top universities to Corporations and Non Profits looking to discover innovative solutions to challenging problems in Business, Technology and Social Innovation.

• The Open Source Science Project, founded in 2008, is a web-based social business that maintains a research microfinance platform through which undergraduate students may propose research-based approaches to solving the world's most pressing problems; and receive funding (in the form of microinvestments) from the broader online community. In addition, The OSSP seeks to develop an openly-accessible research-based scientific curriculum that will greatly increase global access to cutting edge research information at no cost. It is wholly dedicated to rendering transparent the 'black-box' of scientific research by affording all individuals - irrespective of geographic, cultural, socio-economic, academic, or personal background; the opportunity to participate directly in the scientific research process.

• 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 Open Dinosaur Project was founded to involve scientists and the public alike in developing a comprehensive database of dinosaur limb bone measurements, to investigate questions of dinosaur function and evolution. 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.

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

P

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The Phrase Detectives game collects linguistic data (primarily anaphora) using crowd sourcing instead of expert linguistic annotators. Over 2000 players have created more than 1 million linguistic relations. Analysis of the results has shown that the collective wisdom of the players is comparable to that of a linguistic expert.

• Poptent.net - Poptent is a crowdsourcing platform/social network used to provide video content for Major Brands. With a large community of professional, independent filmmakers all over the country, it isn't much of a challenge for Poptent to satisfy any brands need for video content. An assignment will be posted for a Brands specific creative needs. A Poptent community member can then "accept" the assignment and download all of the digital assets (logo's, banners, pre-roll, footage of the product, ect.) and the creative brief constructed by the brand. An assignment will run for about 40-50 days until a deadline is reached. During this time, creators on the site and not only team members from poptent, but the brand itself can communicate on the assignments message board called the "Town-Hall". At the end of the assignment the brand can shop around with all of their new media to choose from. A usage fee of at least $5,000 is then issued to the creator from the brand. It's a win win for all! Register now at Poptent.net!

R

• RateMyStreet is a web-tool that uses Crowdsourcing, Google Maps and a five star rating system to empower local communities to rate the Walkability or Pedestrian access of their local streets. Users can rate a street using eight different categories: Crossing the street, Pavement/Sidewalk width, Trip hazards, Wayfinding, Safety from crime, Road safety, Clean/attractive and disabled peoples access.

S

• Originally started as a Facebook Group in 2010 in response to a competition to win an internship at Saatchi & Saatchi, Secret London gained 150,000 members within 2 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Star Wars Uncut features fan-made clips of the entire Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. There are a total of 472 scenes, each consisting of 15 seconds. Fans are able to choose a scene from the movie, and recreate it according to their own vision. After accepting their scene, they have 30 days to complete it. There have also been hints about remaking the entire Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back on their blog

T

• TaskArmy.com, is a online marketplace for services to businesses with a twist. Freelancers list the tasks they can do for $99. TaskArmy has been created by Wise Labs Pty Ltd, an Australian company.

• The Sheep Market, is created by Aaron Koblin and it is an art project in online crowdsourcing. It is a collection of 10,000 different sheep drawn by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers. Their wages for this experiment was only $0.02 per sheep.

• 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 and a short film competition for Tyson Foods Hunger Relief.

• Trada is a company that provides a crowdsourcing approach to paid search campaigns. Through a marketplace mechanism companies can have many paid search experts work together to create, manage, and optimize single PPC campaigns on major ad networks. Trada leverages the principal that a lot of people thinking about how your customer might look for your product is better than any one. This approach takes advantage of the auction pricing model on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.. where less common searches are less expensive to advertise on. Thus, costs can be reduced through the wisdom of the crowd. In addition, as paid search is an activity that requires constant optimization, the premise is that a crowd of people working on a paid search campaign constantly can make more optimizations (and thus attain better results) than any one individual. Trada is located in Boulder, Co.

• Tweenbots is a project created by Kacie Kinzer, which consists of small robots navigating New York City with the help of pedestrians. Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. The robots are only able to move in a straight line and rely on people to redirect them. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. The pedestrians who choose to help act as participants in the experiment, and these anonymous contributions allow the robots to reach their destinations. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.” This project explores how a human-oriented system works to reach a specified goal. In New York, people are very occupied with getting from one place to another. Kinzer wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it?

U

• 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.

V

• The Vox Pop Experiments is a crowdsourcing project created by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, who is an artist, scholar and experimental documentary filmmaker whose work explores the ruptures that occur when voices of intimacy interject themselves into more public or professional spaces. He holds an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and is currently an MFA candidate at UC Santa Cruz. His project allows its audience to ask random individuals questions from the comfort of their computer. His project represents a series of performative explorations in which remotely distributed audiences are mediated as collaborative agents in the here-and-now of a public interview space. Users can vote on different questions and the most popular ones will then be asked to random people on the street. The Synaptic Crowd tool crowd-sources the traditional vox pop video interview by enabling distributed groups to conduct interviews collaboratively through the phone of a remote camera operator. The interviewer has no control over what questions are being asked. The questions being asked are completely under the discretion of the public. This project seeks to understand how delegating the responsibility of question formation to a collective body will transform the social dynamics of interview interactions.

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W

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

• Wishabi, a Canadian online shopping platform, recruits a community of deal hunters to crowdsource product offers available to Canadians. Participants are rewarded with monetary incentive proportional to their individual contribution divided by the total contribution of the community. Top participants upload about 1000 offers a month averaging a 80-90% accuracy rate.

• whytheyhate.us is a participatory web photo project by artist Steve Lambert. The project uses images submitted to the photo hosting site Flickr, a popular photo hosting site. The images uploaded are various reasons for why people hold dislike for the US. The participants images are chosen randomly from uploaded photos tagged "whytheyhateus". The site is an open forum and images displayed are not curated, edited, or censored. Anyone can contribute any image to the dialog. Eventually every image will be shown in the random display.

Z

• Zooppa is a global social network for creative talent that crowdsources advertising. Founded in 2007, Zooppa partners with companies to launch brand sponsored advertising contests. In competition for cash prizes, members submit their original ads in response to a company's creative brief. Grand prize winners are selected by the brands, and additional awards are given to creators as determined by vote of the Zooppa community and selection by the Zooppa staff. As of May 2010, more than 70 brands have launched crowdsourced advertising campaigns on Zooppa's platform including Google, Nike, Hershey’s, General Mills, Microsoft, NBC Universal, and Mini Cooper.