Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science). The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms. The word was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article. Projects which make use of group intelligence such as the LazyWeb predate that word coinage by several years.

Recently, the Internet has been used to publicize and manage crowdsourcing projects.

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