As my issues with 1and1 continue, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The errors and problems I was encountering were not solved or explained by their FAQ/Help pages, and in most cases, no help even existed. What I did notice though, was that I could google my issue and there were literally hundreds of results from other disgruntled 1and1 customers that were very helpful to me to at least learn more about the issues that I was facing.

This is a subtle example of crowdsourcing in it’s unorganized form – masked as a virtual crowd connected by the internet. Thanks to the internet, and today’s search technology, crowdsourcing is a reality.

What is crowdsourcing? Well, it has many definitions and comes in many forms, but in the broadest terms, it refers to the distribution of a defined task with a defined outcome and “putting it out there” (usually via the internet) to many potential task performers. The goal is that the collective knowledge of the tens, hundreds, thousands of task performers will help find a “better” solution. Here the term “better” may mean cheaper, faster, more original, or even a solution at all.

There are a ton of real world examples of crowdsourcing out there. Wikipedia is one. The task is compiling an internet encyclopedia from scratch. Instead of hiring a team to accomplish this, the work was effectively croudsourced.

Wired magazine first tackled the answer to the question “What is crowdsourcing?” in their june 2006 issue.