5.4 Crowdsourcing

Enduring Understanding

While computing innovations are typically designed to achieve a specific purpose, they may have unintended consequences.

Learning Objective

Explain how people participate in problem-solving processes at scale.

Essential Knowledge

Widespread access to information and public data facilitates the identification of problems, development of solutions, and dissemination of results

Science has been affected by using distributed and “citizen science” to solve scientific problems.

Citizen science is scientific research conducted in whole or part by distributed individuals, many of whom may not be scientists, who contribute relevant data to research using their own computing devices.

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining input or information from a large number of people via the Internet.

Human capabilities can be enhanced by collaboration via computing.

Crowdsourcing offers new models for collaboration, such as connecting businesses or social causes with funding.