The term “Crowdsourcing” is a blend of “Crowd” and “Outsourcing,” first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing“. Crowdsourcing is simply the practice of companies making an open call to a broad community to solve a problem, either through competition or collaboration.

The term has become popular with businesses, 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.

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