Crowdsourcing
Wisdom of the Crowd · Collective Intelligence
The process of obtaining feedback, services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people — often associated with Internet communities — where when a large group's aggregated answers to questions has been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within a group.
Origin
Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired, coined the term in a June 2006 article defining it as issuing to an open public network a task traditionally performed by an employee. The portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing" emerged in conversation with editor Mark Robinson as they searched for a name for a pattern already visible across industries. Howe expanded the idea into a 2008 book and credited James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) as a key intellectual precursor.