Tapping into the power of the crowd— a list of 100 uses of crowdsourcing

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Some things are not just one person’s job and needs the whole world to pitch-in to make it happen, like world peace — but for now, here are some intriguing crowd-sourced projects that are using the power of a crowd to make major projects come to life.

My personal involvement with crowdsourcing goes back to my upbringing in a faith community whose leadership gets elected from across the world from the grassroots; and as it relates to business, I’ve been able to bring two crowdsourcing startups into full fruition, one still operating.

Here’s that wikipedia article with the list of anything and everything that is crowdsourced in the world today and below are a few unique and intriguing projects that you may be personally interested in and may even want to contribute to:

• Ajapaik.ee is a platform for crowdsourcing geotags and rephotographs for historic view images
• Amara is a website that enables crowdsourced translations of videos from a variety of popular video hosting websites.
• Arcbazar, American crowdsourcing platform for architectural design services, established in 2010 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• AstroDrone is a scientific crowdsourcing project of the European Space Agency.
• Australian Historic Newspapers provided by the National Library of Australia encourages members of the public to correct/fix up/improve the electronically translated (OCR) text of old newspapers.
• Betaville is an interactive multi-person architectural software and open source platform, which enables the public to visualise planned buildings that are to be built and collaborate or give feedback on urban planning.
• By the People is a Library of Congress crowdsourcing project that invites volunteers to engage with the raw materials of literature, history and more, by transcribing, reviewing, and tagging a wide variety of handwritten and typed documents in the Library’s collections.
• CitySourced is an enterprise civic engagement platform. CitySourced provides a mobile app in order for citizens to identify and report non-emergency civic issues, such as public works, quality of life, and environmental issues.
• CrowdMed is a healthcare crowdsourcing platform based in San Francisco, California.
• Drift bottle experiments are citizen science experiments in which a surveying organization throws into large bodies of water, bottles containing messages requesting finders of the bottles to return the messages to the organization with a statement of the time and place at which the bottles were found, allowing the organization to determine patterns of water circulation in the bodies of water.
• Ecomate runs a crowdsourcing algorithm to calculate the sustainability (economical, social and environmental) rating of a company.
• EyeWire, a game by Sebastian Seung in which players help an algorithm to segment retinal cells in 3D images of the retina. The aim is to map a mouse retina by extracting individual neurons and their connections to each other.
• Feedback Roulette is a free service for anonymous exchange of feedback about websites
• Foldit invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies.
• Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
• Gooseberry Patch, has been using crowdsourcing to create their community-style cookbooks since 1992. Friends, buyers, fans, sales people are all encouraged to submit a recipe. Each contributors’ recipe that is selected is recognized in the book and receives a free copy.
• Indian rupee sign was recently developed in 2010, by using crowdsourcing to select its design through an open competition among Indian residents.
• The Katrina PeopleFinder Project used crowdsourcing to collect data for lost persons. Over 4,000 people donated their time after Hurricane Katrina. It included 90,000 entries.
• LegalAdvice is a website that launched in 2012 that allows for multiple attorneys to submit answers to clients looking for legal assistance. The client selects the best answer from all the attorney responses.
• Life in a Day is a crowdsourced drama/documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, 24 July 2010.
• At LibriVox.org, volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then release the audio files back onto the net for free. All the audio is donated back into the public domain.
• Moovit is a transit app and platform which makes use of the crowd in two ways: first by letting community editors add and edit transit data.
• Moral Machine is an online platform that generates moral dilemmas and collects information on the decisions that people think an autonomous vehicle should make between two death outcomes.
• Open Food Facts gathers information and data on food products from around the world.
• OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the world.
• Queen Silvia Nursing Award is a crowdsourcing campaign to find and develop national elderly and dementia care services.
• reCAPTCHA uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas.
• SeeClickFix is a web tool that allows citizens to report non-emergency neighborhood issues, which are communicated to local government, as a form of community activism.
• SETILive is an online project of Zooniverse. Its goal is to use the human brain’s ability to recognize patterns to find extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI’s).
• Torneo de Ideas is the first Mexican crowdsourcing platform, it is a community whose main objective is to provide creative solutions to the needs of small and middle Hispanic corporations.
• TV by the People Is a project aimed at creating the first ever TV format through crowd wisdom.
• Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map.
• VenCorps, founded in 2008, is a venture capital fund which invests based upon crowdsourced decisions.
• Waze is a free turn-by-turn GPS application for mobile phones that uses crowdsourcing to provide routing and real-time traffic updates.
• Wikipedia is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing, despite objections by co-founder Jimmy Wales to the term.