Crowdsourcing

by Jeff Howe

"The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing ­corrects that--but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction." --From CrowdsourcingFirst identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is