List of crowdsourcing projects

Below is a list of projects that rely on crowdsourcing. See also open innovation.

A

• Adaptive Vehicle Make is a project overseen by DARPA to crowdsource the design and manufacture of a new armoured vehicle.
• AED4 allows members of the public to register locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) online, to enable a nearby AED to be quickly located during an emergency using the AED4.US iPhone app (Radboud University Nijmegen).
• Air Quality Eggs by WickedDevices are open-source hardware Internet of Things pollution monitors that facilitate citizen crowdsourcing of air quality readings
• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", it was named after The Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing "machine".
• americanairmuseum.com crowdsources information about the men and women of the US Army Air Forces who served from the UK in the Second World War and the British civilians they met. It collects photographs and information. It was launched in October 2014 by IWM as part of a project focused on the American Air Museum at IWM Duxford.
• The first crowd sourced documentary film is the non-profit "The American Revolution," which went into production in 2005, and which examines the role media played in the cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974 through the story of underground, free-form radio station WBCN-FM in Boston. When the project began, by seeking archival contributions from the public, the term "crowd source" was not in use, and so the film was referred to as the "first open source documentary film." The film is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit Filmmakers Collaborative.
• Arcbazar, American crowdsourcing platform for architectural design services, established in 2010 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Arkitekturbilleder.dk is a picture database documenting modern Danish architecture. Pictures are contributed by volunteer photographers with architectural education and background.
• Article One Partners, founded in 2008, is a community of technology experts who execute crowdsourced prior art search by researching and contributing information related to patents. By submitting research to the online platform, the community members compete for cash rewards, ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.
• AstroDrone is a scientific crowd sourcing project of the European Space Agency. It involves a game for the Parrot AR.Drone. While players perform space missions in an augmented reality, visual features are extracted from the robot's camera images. If players agree to contribute to the experiment, these features are sent to a database. Analysis of the database is meant to improve robotic perception for tasks such as obstacle avoidance.
• 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. This means the full-text search capability is instantly improved for everyone. The service was released in August 2008 and by March 2010 over 12 million lines of text had been improved by thousands of public users. This is the first library project in the world that has undertaken crowdsourcing on a large scale. The leader of the project Rose Holley is an advocate of using crowdsourcing to help libraries and archives expose and improve digital resources and has written articles about the Australian newspaper achievements and tips for libraries on how to crowdsource effectively.

B

• Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation (BOSSA), by analogy with the distributed computing project Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
• 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.
• Any software project with an open Beta test.
• BlueServo was a free website which crowdsources surveillance of the Texas-Mexico border through live camera streams over the Internet. This evolved from an initiative taken by the State of Texas, which announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border, to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents. currently this have been shut down due to lack of funding
• Britain in a Day is a Ridley Scott film, a successor project to Life in a Day and part of the BBC's Cultural Olympiad, in which people in Britain filmed themselves on 12 November 2011, and submitted video clips online for inclusion in the film.

C

• California Digital Newspaper Collection In August 2011 the California Digital Newspaper Collection implemented crowdsourced OCR text correction of its digitized historical newspapers, some published as early as 1846 (California statehood 1850). CDNC is a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California, Riverside. The CDNC is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.
• Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection. In March 2011, the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts launched a digital collection of historic newspapers that implements crowdsourced OCR text correction. The freely accessible and keyword searchable database contains newspapers dating back to 1846 when Cambridge was established as a city. The Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection is a project of the Cambridge Room, the Cambridge Public Library's Archives and Special Collections, and is supported by funding from the Community Preservation Act.
• Chicago History Museum on October 14, 2013, announced a project asking the public to furnish ideas for a future exhibition and reducing the most-often-submitted ideas to one assignment through a series of public votes. According to the American Alliance of Museums, this is the first crowdsourcing project allowing the public to give an exhibition assignment to an American museum.
• 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. The service is part of the e-Government or gov 2.0 movement, which aims to connect government and citizens through the use of technology.
• Cisco Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 was a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother, Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won US$250,000.
• Citizen Archivist Dashboard is a project developed by the US National Archives and Records Administration, beginning with users transcribing 1940 Census data.
• Civil War Diaries & Letters Transcription Project: help improve access to handwritten documents held by The University of Iowa Libraries.
• Clickworkers - experimental NASA site
• Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware has launched the Transcribe Minutes project to transcribe records of the nineteenth-century African American Colored Conventions Movement. The first batch of available documents includes well-known leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet from the 1840s.
• Condor Watch. The California condor is a critically endangered species and the population is suffering from the effects of lead poisoning. By tracking the location and social behavior of the animals we can better detect early warning signs of the illness. A Zooniverse project.
• Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skills (C-SATS), Inc. is a Seattle, WA based medical performance assessment company that performs crowd-based assessment of surgical skills.
• Crowdcrafting is a crowdsourcing platform that invites volunteers to contribute to scientific projects developed by citizens, professionals or institutions that need help to solve problems, analyze data or complete challenging tasks that cant be done by machines alone, but require human intelligence. The platform is 100% open source - that is its software is developed and distributed freely - and 100% open-science, making scientific research accessible to everyone.
• Crowdin is a localization management platform for mobile apps, web, desktop software and related assets. Reddit, Khan Academy, Minecraft and other used the platform to crowdsource localization.
• CrowdFlower was founded in 2007 to manage internet crowdsourcing. It is currently the largest provider of crowdsourcing solutions for enterprise with over 450 million tasks completed and 2 million contributors.
• CrowdMed is a healthcare crowdsourcing platform based in San Francisco, California.
• Crowdspring is a marketplaces for crowdsourced creative services.
• Crowdville combines crowdsourcing, gamification and industrial expertise.

D

• The 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge focused on autonomous vehicles, requiring participating teams to create an autonomous vehicle that was able to successfully navigate traffic as well as complex maneuvers including merging, passing, and parking. To successfully complete the challenge, participating vehicles needed to complete a 60-mile course in less than six hours.
• Dell IdeaStorm is a website launched by Dell on February 16, 2007 to allow Dell "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public.
• The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they choose — whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc.
• The Desal Prize, launched as part of the Securing Water for Food Grand Challenge for Development in conjunction with the United States Bureau of Reclamation, was designed to crowdsource a small-scale, environmentally sustainable, brackish water desalination system with the capability to produce potable water for human consumption in addition to water that could be used for agriculture in developing countries.
• DesignCrowd, a crowdsourcing marketplace for graphic design and creative services, launched in February 2008 and helped run a contest for global footwear company HI-TEC. HI-TEC "estimated that using DesignCrowd.com [and crowdsourcing] for the project saved HI-TEC up to half the costs of going down the usual design route". DesignCrowd purchased BrandStack and formed BrandCrowd On 20 December 2011.
• LEGO Design byME was a service connected with the construction toy Lego. Launched in 2005 under the name Lego Factory, the service allowed people to design their own Lego models using a computer program, then upload them to the Lego website, design their own box design, and order them for actual delivery. The brand also covers a small selection of products that have been designed by Lego fans, and which were available to purchase as a set.
• Dickens Journals online is a collaborative effort to digitize and edit journals of Charles Dickens.
• The search for aviator Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe that was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful. Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means. DigitalGlobe satellite imagery had previously been posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk after the disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray at sea in January 2007, an effort that had attracted much media attention, but not provided any new clues.
• DigiVol is a project developed by the Australian Museum, in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia, to harness the power of online volunteers to digitise data that is locked up in biodiversity collections, field notebooks and survey sheets.
• Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a Web-based project founded in 2000 by Charles Franks that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of October 2011, over 21,000 e-texts have been produced by DP. There are also offshoots (sister sites) such as DP-Europe and DP-Canada.
• DIY History is a project from the University of Iowa that calls upon the public to help transcribe historical documents. It began as a project to help transcribe American Civil War diaries and grew to include every type of historical document, most notably more than 300 years of handwritten cookbooks from the Chef Louis Szathmary Culinary Collection.
• 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.
• Duolingo: With Duolingo you learn a language for free while helping to translate the web.

E

• Emporis, a provider of building data, has run the Emporis Community (a website where members can submit building information) since May 2000. Today, more than 1,000 members contribute building data throughout the world.
• The ESP Game by Luis von Ahn (later acquired by Google and renamed Google Image Labeler) started in 2003 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. This game led to the concept of Games with a purpose.
• EteRNA, a game in which players attempt to design RNA sequences that fold into a given configuration. The widely varied solutions from players, often non-biologists, are evaluated to improve computer models predicting RNA folding. Some designs are actually synthesized to evaluate the actual folding dynamics and directly compare with the computer models.
• Europeana 1914-1918 is a collaboration led by Europeana with support from the The Great War Archive team at the University of Oxford. A website is used by the project to encourage the public from all European Union states to contribute information about World War I, especially their family's stories and digitised photographs of their artefacts. In addition to the website, since 2011 First World War stories have been collected in person from family history roadshow events held in Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Slovenia, Denmark, with further events planned in Cyprus, Belgium, Italy and more. The items collected by the project are released on the Internet for use under a Creative Commons licence.
• 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.

F

• Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.
• FamilySearch Indexing is a volunteer project which aims to create searchable digital indexes for scanned images of historical documents. The documents are drawn primarily from a collection of 2.4 million microfilms made of historical documents from 110 countries and principalities. Volunteers install free software on their home computers, download images from the site, type the data they read from the image into the software, and submit their work back to the site. The data is eventually made publicly and freely available at familysearch.org (the world's largest nonprofit genealogical organization) for use in genealogical research. Over one billion historical records have been transcribed to date.
• There is an ongoing effort by United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use crowdsourcing to collect ideas on how to best build out America's broadband infrastructure. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 calls for increased broadband deployment. The site, broadband.ideascale.com, allows a citizen to post an idea related to this initiative. Other visitors are invited to vote the ideas up or down. The ideas and comments have been made part of the public record.
• Feedback Roulette is a free service for anonymous exchange of feedback about websites. There are over 4500 registered members, over 4700 websites and over 19000 reviews submitted according to the publicly available statistics. Members review each other's websites and rate received reviews to specify how useful the feedback is. Based on that the reviewer's reputation is calculated. The system then uses the reputation to match reviewers. Feedback Roulette audience includes web masters, designers, developers, Internet business owners and entrepreneurs and anyone who is interested in gathering feedback and improving their website.
• Folding@Home is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding. This is of academic interest with implications for medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.
• Foldit invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies. Citing Foldit, MSNBC's Alan Boyle reported that "video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years," indicating that they "figure(d) out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys."
• Freelancer.com started out in Sweden in 2004 as GetAFreelancer.com, and is now owned by Sydney, Australia-based Ignition Networks. M Barrie, the CEO, claims the company is the largest outsourcing site in the world, receiving more global traffic than competitor elance. The site has 1.5 million users in 234 countries and the average job size is under $200 and it projects a US$50 million in project turnover in the next 12 months. The site takes a 10 percent cut on work allocated.
• FromThePage is free software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents online. It is used by the San Diego Natural History Museum to transcribe the Laurence M. Klauber Field Notes, by Southwestern University to transcribe the Mexican War diary of Zenas Matthews, and others. The platform integrates with the Archive.org CMS, and the transcriptions can include semantic mark-up for indexing and annotation. Users can either host the platform on their own servers by getting the source code from GitHub, or have hosting provided by the FromThePage organization.

G

• Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The project has led to numerous scientific papers and citizen scientist-led discoveries such as Hanny's Voorwerp.
• "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth - Image Detective" is an interactive citizen science hunt for the Earth location of images taken from space by astronauts since the 1960s. Reviewing 1.8 million photos, individuals submit what they believe to be the location of a given photo, and thus accumulate "points" and "badges" on part of the NASA website.
• General Electric organized a multimillion-dollar challenge to find new, breakthrough ideas to create cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid technologies, and to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies.
• Genius, according to their website, is "the world’s biggest collection of song lyrics and crowdsourced musical knowledge." It was previously referred to as Rap Exegesis and Rap Genius to decode complex rap lyrics. Now their mission is to "annotate the world".
• GeniusRocket is a crowdsourcing advertising agency that uses an online community of thousands of artists from around the world.
• GeoTag-X is a crowdsourcing research project set up by UNOSAT (the United Nations Institute for Training and Research's Operational Satellite Applications Programme) as part of the Citizen Cyberlab project. GeoTag-X aims to help disaster relief efforts on the ground to plan a response by asking volunteers to analyse photos taken in disaster-affected areas.
• The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data on its Red Lake, Ontario, property available to the public over the Internet. They offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, over 80% of which proved productive; yielding 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion. The prize was won by a small consultancy in Perth, Western Australia, called Fractal Graphics.
• Google Image Labeler was a sort of game where users were asked to label pictures in order to improve images search results.
• Google Translate The Google Translate Community serves as a way to improve google's translation quality. It allows anyone to volunteer and make the translations better for everyone using google translate.
• Gooseberry Patch, has been using crowd-sourcing 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.
• GoViral Study is a crowdsourcing research project that collects fluid specimens from the community and analyzes them with the latest molecular diagnostics instruments. The study examines viral and symptom information from people in one community and examine how this can be used to predict an individual's risk of influenza and other respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses. A self-collected specimen kit is sent to participants and at any time someone gets sick, they are asked to provide a nasal swab, saliva or fecal sample. The study is being conducted by Dr. Rumi Chunara at New York University, and it is being funded by the National Science Foundation and is part of Open Humans.
• The Great War Archive, was a 2008 project led by the University of Oxford that asked members of the general public to digitise any artefacts they held relating to the First World War and upload them to a purpose built website. The project successfully released over 6500 items and stories online which can be freely downloaded and used for education and research. The project was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. In 2011, the team at the University of Oxford received further funding from Europeana to run a similar crowdsourcing initiative in Germany. From 2012 Europeana extended this to become a project called "Europeana 1914-1918", a collaboration led by Europeana with support from the team at the University of Oxford. There is a website where the project encourages the public from all European Union states to contribute information about World War I, especially their family's stories and digitised photographs of their artefacts.
• The Guardian's investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in the United Kingdom. The newspaper created a system to allow the public to search methodically through 700,000 expense-claim documents. Over 20,000 people participated in finding erroneous and remarkable expense claims by Members of Parliament.

H

• herberia@home documents botanical collections in the United Kingdom.
• The Vancouver Police Department has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD′s investigations into the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of July 1, 2011, 101 arrests have been made.
• Humanoid is a startup aiming to build an aggregator of crowdsourcing marketplaces (including Amazon Mechanical Turk), adding a layer of automated workforce management on top of crowdsourced labor. Workers are asked to review each other's work, and bots assign each worker a reputation, automatically rerouting tasks by throwing in errors to test workers and otherwise computing worker fatigue.

I

• IBM collected over 37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees and their family members in 2006.
• ImageBrief is a Sydney start-up established in 2011 that aims to provide a platform for connecting commercial photographers with buyers of their images. Buyers can post a brief for an immediate image requirement and photographers submit images that are tailored to the buyer's request.
• Indian rupee sign was recently developed in 2010, by using crowdsourcing to select its design through an open competition among Indian residents.
• The Infinity: The Quest for Earth project is a space MMOG that accepts contributions of concept art, 3D models, textures, sound effects, musical compositions and programming of standalone prototypes which could help development of the game. By the end of 2009 having contributions of more than 150 modeled ships, buildings and space stations, about 500 musical compositions from which 20% are considered for inclusion in the game.
• InfoArmy is a crowdsourcing platform for business data. Users research online for competitive intelligence information on public and private companies to create iPad and web reports. Current researchers come from a variety of backgrounds and from six continents.
• InnoCentive, started in 2001, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive provides connection and relationship management services between "Seekers" and "Solvers". Seekers are the companies searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 185,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone with interest and Internet access can become an InnoCentive Solver. Solvers whose solutions are selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive, which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to target solutions from InnoCentive's Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social initiatives.
• Inno Crowd is a crowdsourcing platform developed by consulting firm Inno Garage specializing in management solutions.
• Innovation Exchange is an open innovation vendor which emphasizes community diversity; it sources solutions to business problems from both experts and novices. Companies sponsor challenges which are responded to by individuals, people working in ad hoc teams, or by small and midsize businesses. In contrast to sites focused primarily on innovation in the physical sciences, Innovation Exchange fosters product, service, process, and business model innovation.

J

• Jade Magnet is Asia's largest creative crowdsourcing platform for design solutions like logos, brochures, websites, flyers, animations with a focus on SMEs. It is a Technology platform supporting clients to extract multiple options for creative solutions before making a selection. Additionally as a value add, clients can make use of Delivery Assurance service to manage requirements

K

• Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions. Kaggle facilitates better predictions by providing a platform for machine learning, data prediction and bioinformatics competitions. The platform allows organizations to have their data scrutinized by the world's best statisticians.
• 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.
• Khan Academy—a non-profit organization founded by educational entrepreneur Salman Khan and which has as its mission to provide a world-class education to anyone for free—is relying on volunteers to subtitle into the widely spoken languages of the world Khan Academy's substantial collection of educational videos on subjects ranging from math to art history.

L

• 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.
• In 2010 the Library of Congress received, as a donation, the Liljenquist family's collection of photographs of the American Civil War. With most of the people and photographers unidentified, the Library posted the images on Flickr and sought the public's help in providing information: "Please let us know if you recognize a face from your family, a regiment, or a photographer's painted studio backdrop!"
• Life in a Day is Kevin Macdonald's 95-minute documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips (4500 hours) submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day. Yumi Goto of TIME LightBox remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it's the first crowdsourced, user-generated content to hit the big screen."
• The Living New Deal is a research project and online public archive documenting the scope and impact of the New Deal on Americans' lives and landscape. The Living New Deal relies on a network of Research Associates and other volunteers, including historians, teachers, students, artists, history buffs, librarians, journalists, and photographers to document New Deal sites throughout the U.S. Anyone can sign up to volunteer.
• L'Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of Current TV to pool new and fresh advertising ideas.

M

• McMaster Postcard Project is a platform created by the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at the [McMaster University Library] for crowd sourcing information about an archival collection of historical postcards with the card's country, province and city of origin, as well as the card's date. There's also a "notes" section where postcard aficionados can add any other pertinent information. Currently cards are categorized only by province, international cards by country.
• Microtask is a company that has developed a software platform for global distribution of short-duration tasks to online workers. The system supports automated quality assurance and provides service-level agreements for task quality and turnaround times.
• The Milky Way Project is a project that aims to identify bubbles in the Milky Way with users analyzing infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope.
• Mindpixel was an online artificial intelligence project to build a knowledgebase of true/false statements, and ran from 2000 to 2005.
• Mob4Hire is the world's largest mobile testing and market research community. They currently list over 1,100 developers in 86 countries and more than 45,000 testers on 350 carriers in 150 countries. The company recently won a Meffy award from the Mobile Entertainment Forum for 'Most Innovative Business Model'.

N

• Netflix Prize, was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by Netflix, an online DVD-rental service, and was completed in September 2009. The grand prize of $1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which best shows Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%. Netflix provided a training data set of over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies, which is one of the largest real real-life data sets available for research. The related forum maintained by Netflix has seen lively discussions and contributed a lot to the success of this competition. A very relevant fact to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams are not only academic researchers, but laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering (virtually learning the problem space from scratch).

O

See also: open innovation

• Open Food Facts gathers information and data on food products from around the world.
• Old Weather is a web-based effort to transcribe weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes and will be of use to historians in tracking past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
• OpenSeaMap - the free nautical chart covers seas, lakes, inland waterways and rivers for the needs of sailors, divers, fisher men and canoeists. The data is collected by crowd sourcing. In a new project OpenSeaMap collect shallow water depths worldwide for making bathimetric charts.
• OpenSignal is a project to independently map cell phone carrier coverage and performance. All data is collected from a smartphone application that has been downloaded over 3.5m times worldwide.
• OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the world, which has over 100,000 signed up contributors in mid-2009. Creation and maintenance of geospatial data is a labor-intensive task which is expensive using traditional approaches, and crowdsourcing is also being used by commercial companies in this area including Google and TomTom.
• Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) mid-2008 launched a crowdsourcing initiative named Doeners.net, meant for people to support the organization's campaigning activities.
• Online volunteering service (United Nations) is a free service that connects grassroots organizations, international NGOs, local governments, educational institutions and United Nations agencies with thousands of individuals ready to volunteer via the Internet to help address development challenges. The service was launched in 2000 and it quickly attracted thousands of people ready to volunteer online. In 2014 alone, UN Online Volunteers undertook 16,134 assignments.

P

• Path launched a project to crowdsource translations for its mobile platform in April 2012.
• There is currently an effort to use crowdsourcing to purchase the Pabst Brewing Company. Users pledge money toward the $300 million purchase price and, if the project is successful, receive part ownership of the company and free beer proportional to their donation amount.
• Pepsi launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States.
• PhraseApp is a translation management platform that can be used to translate digital content, software, games and apps. It offers an in-context-editor and professional human translation.
• The Phylo video game invites players to give in to their addictive gaming impulses while contributing to the greater good by trying to decode the code for genetic diseases.
• Planet Hunters is a citizen science project where users can try to find extrasolar planets identifying patterns in the brightness data of stars retrieved by the Kepler Space Mission.
• Play to cure: Genes in space is a Cancer Research UK mobile game which is free to download on iOS and Android. The game allows players to help analyse DNA data by controlling the path of a spaceship.
• Prova (Swedish for "to try") launched December, 2008 as a crowdsource marketplace that connects businesses with professional ad designers to create print designs, audio ads, video content, and digital designs. Ad designers from all over the world compete for ad creation projects listed on the site.
• PyBossa an open source platform for crowdsourcing with ready-to-use templates for image, sound and video pattern recognition, data mining/enrichment of PDFs and geocoding tools.

Q

• Quantum Moves is a game developed under the Science at Home.org umbrella project, designed by Center for Community Driven Research (CODER) at Aarhus University, which aims to merge theoretical and experimental quantum research with online community efforts to explore the potential for online citizen science in this otherwise highly specialized field.
• Queen Silvia Nursing Award is a crowdsourcing campaign to find and develop national elderly and dementia care services. The campaign runs annually since 2013 in Sweden and in 2014 also in Finland. It is hosted by Swedish Care International and uses the Innopinion gamified crowdsourcing platform.

R

• reCAPTCHA uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. Humans are presented images of the book, and asked to provide the corresponding text. Twenty years of The New York Times have already been digitized.
• Reverse The Odds A mini puzzle game which incorporates the analysis of real cancer data into the game which takes seconds.
• RootMetrics (a.k.a. Root Wireless) uses a mobile client application on various kinds of smartphones to collect data about carrier signal quality and data speeds, then transmits that data to its servers. Consumers can view the crowdsourced data online in the form of color-coded maps that aid purchasing decisions by showing unbiased data from different carriers side-by-side.
• Royal British Columbia Museum transcription project allows volunteers to transcribe documents in their collections to assist those papers in becoming more accessible.

S

• SBV IMPROVER is a crowd sourcing method for the verification of scientific data and concepts in systems biology research. The SBV IMPROVER methodology could be applied in a variety of fields, wherever a clearer understanding of biological mechanisms is needed to help solve important problems, such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, nutrition, environmental safety and consumer product development.
• Secret London is composed mostly of Londoners who use the site to share suggestions and photos of London. Originally started as a Facebook Group in 2010 in response to a competition to win an internship at Saatchi & Saatchi, Secret London gained 150,000 members within 2 weeks. This early popularity prompted its founder, Tiffany Philippou to appeal to the community to help build the group a website, which was launched 10 days later.
• 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. It has an associated free mobile phone application. Similar to FixMyStreet.
• 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).
• Show us a better way is a British crowdsourcing initiative that ask people a way to improve the communication of public data. The winning idea has been awarded with a £20,000 fund prize.
• Sightsmap is a sightseeing popularity heatmap overlaid on Google Maps, based on crowdsourcing: the number of Panoramio photos at each place in the world.
• Smartling is an enterprise translation management platform that can be used to crowdsource translations for digital content. IMVU, Cloudflare, and Path used the platform to crowdsource website translations.
• Smartsheet is an online software service and consultancy that enables businesses to track and manage work through online sharing and crowdsourcing methods. The company's Smartsourcing service enables people to anonymously submit and manage all phases of crowdsourced work processing. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is one of the work exchange platforms with which Smartsheet is integrated.
• Smithsonian transcription center is a crowdsourcing transcription project that enables the transcription of a wide variety of content in the Smithsonian Institution collections.
• Snapwire is a platform that connects photographers with brands, publishers, small businesses, and creatives around the world looking for specific images that they can't find through traditional stock photo services. Photo buyers post a request for authentic photography, set their own price and photographers compete for the posted amount, earn points, level up and receive up to 70% on their photo sales. Buyers get unique images that match their vision, and the winning photographers get paid.
• SoMedia Networks uses a managed crowdsourced workforce of videographers and producers to provide scalable video production services across North America.
• Squadhelp is a crowdsourcing platform that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners outsource their branding, marketing and web design tasks to hundreds of freelancers. The projects run in the form of contests and the best submission wins the award (which is prepaid by the contest holder).
• My Starbucks Idea is a community website realized by Starbucks. It is designed to collect suggestions and feedback from customers. The website is powered by the Salesforce.com software.
• Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer "clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.
• Student of Fortune is an online service that allows students to submit homework problems for tutors to answer through a tutorial service for a fee. Started by a high school dropout.
• SunShot Catalyst, run by the US Department of Energy, is a crowdsourced open innovation program based on a series of prize challenges with the goal of rapid creation and development of products and solutions for the U.S. solar marketplace.

T

• Tomnod crowdsources the identification of objects and places in satellite images using online map interfaces that engage many people to each view and tag a small section of a large area on the planet. Projects include searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan, mapping earthquake damage after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, Malaysia Flight 370, and counting refugee camps in Somalia.
• 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. They currently provide solutions mainly on graphic design and each project or "tournament" receive an average of 150 designs. Torneo de Ideas was winner of the startup contest Wayra Mexico 2012 and has been mentioned in several entrepreneur publications such as Entrepreneur.
• Transcribe Bentham is a crowdsourced manuscript transcription project launched in 2010. It is run by University College London's Bentham Project, in association with other UCL partners and the University of London Computer Centre. The project makes available, via a specially-designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's Bentham Papers collection — the unpublished writings of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which run to some 60,000 manuscript folios — which volunteers are encouraged to transcribe. The transcripts are intended to contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and are uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository, widening access to the collection. Media coverage has included a feature article in The New York Times, and a broadcast on Deutsche Welle radio. The project was shortlisted for the 2011 Digital Heritage Award, and received an Award of Distinction in the Digital Communities category of the 2011 Prix Ars Electronica. The open-source code for the project's transcription tool is available for reuse and customisation.
• TV by the People Is a project aimed at creating the first ever TV format through crowd wisdom. Launched in March 2013, it drew 1420 TV shows ideas submitted to tvbythepeople.com. The second phase was a six weeks development session in a closed Facebook group The creative team included 580 people from four continents in a 24/7 lively debate. The project is a joint venture of Armoza Formats, Israel and Screentime ShinAwiL, Ireland. Daniel Ravner initiated and led the project and crowd wisdom researcher Lior Zoref acted as consultant. The project was covered widely and the developed format “Turning Point” is currently in pre production.

U

• Unilever used the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign for their snack food brand Peperami.
• Userfarm Userfarm is the first international platform of video crowdsourcing. Brands, Agencies, Publishers and Broadcasters can access on UserFarm a network of more than 20.000 videomakers able to create a full range of different forms of video content:

1. real life: video diaries, documentaries, stories of journeys in videos made by the video makers of UserFarm
2. journalism: local news, sport events, event coverage and interviews done by mobile journalists
3. advertising: TV spots, viral videos, tutorials for any product or service
4. how to: video advice for a wide range of topics, from bricolage to looking after home pets
5. fiction: shorts, parodies, comedy sketches, mash ups
6. other: videoart, cartoons, music videos and talent scouting

• Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map. It is also the name of the open source software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects.
• uTest's business model is based on the idea that crowdsourcing is better suited to web and mobile app testing than other outsourcing models.

V

• VenCorps, founded in 2008, is a venture capital fund which invests based upon crowd-sourced decisions.

W

• Waze is a free turn-by-turn GPS application for mobile phones that uses crowdsourcing to provide routing and real-time traffic updates.
• We Are The World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition) is a massively collaborative charity song and music video produced by Canadian singer-songwriter Lisa Lavie and posted to the YouTube video sharing website to raise money for victims of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. The video was the creation of a collaboration of 57 unsigned or independent YouTube musicians geographically distributed around the world. The Tokyo Times referred to J Rice's subsequently produced "We Pray for You" video, involving largely the same participants as were in Lavie's video, as an example of a trend to use crowdsourcing for charitable purposes.
• Wikipedia is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing, despite objections by co-founder Jimmy Wales to the term.
• Wishabi, a Canadian online shopping platform, used to recruit a community of deal hunters to crowdsource product offers available to Canadians. Participants were rewarded with monetary incentive proportional to their individual contribution divided by the total contribution of the community. Top participants uploaded about 1,000 offers a month averaging an 80-90% accuracy rate.
• Worth1000 is a community focused on creative contests, occasionally with financial incentives. Original contests invited members to submit manipulated images (typically using Photoshop) for specific themes, often of a comic nature. Now they have new contests regularly for photo effects (aka manipulated images), photography without effects, illustrations, writing and multimedia. While most contests are run by the website, anyone can apply to post a contest, and people seeking professional creative work like logo design are encouraged to add financial incentives to their requests for less playful creativity.

X

• X-Prize is an innovation incentive prize using crowdsourcing mechanisms in order to tackle grand challenges that are considered failing as free markets. These represent pressing needs the humanity seeks solutions for, that previously have not been served by real entrepreneurial action.
• xTune is an enterprise social software that uses crowdsourcing to distribute work inside organizations.

Z

• Zooniverse is an Internet-based citizen science project that uses the active participation of human volunteers to complete projects requiring more subtle reasoning or perception than electronic computer networks, its projects including Galaxy Zoo to amass from telescopic photographs the world's largest database of classified galaxies, and the Plankton Portal to classify plankton from about a million underwater images.
• Zooppa is a global social network for creative talent that crowdsources advertising. Founded in 2007, Zooppa partners with companies to launch brand sponsored advertising contests. In competition for cash prizes, members submit their original ads in response to a company's creative brief. Grand prize winners are selected by the brands, and additional awards are given to creators as determined by vote of the Zooppa community and selection by the Zooppa staff. As of May 2010, more than 70 brands have launched crowdsourced advertising campaigns on Zooppa's platform including Google, Nike, Hershey's, General Mills, Microsoft, NBC Universal, and Mini Cooper.

See also

• Comparison of crowdfunding services
• List of citizen science projects