R2 Blog Response

      Crowdsourcing can be defined as the process of getting work or funding from a "crowd" of people, usually done on the internet. One of the famous examples is Wikipedia, where instead of creating an encyclopedia on their own, they gave the actual crowd of commoners their own ability to create the information themselves. Different types of Crowdsourcing  includes: Crowdsource Design, Crowd funding, Microtasks, an open innovation.

      Aaron Koblin explains how crowdsourcing relates to projects he worked on including one called Flight Patterns. He shows a beautifully aesthetic display of flight pattern information which showed data from West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. By being able to visualize crowdsourcing Aaron Koblin says that we can reflect on our own lives and systems.

     Jimmy Wales goes into detail about the birth of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. He explains how the overall goal is about empowerment and making a free licensing model which allows anyone to copy and redistribute information globally. He goes into the detailed statistics on who uses Wikipedia and surprisingly only 1/3 of the total traffic is to the English Wikipedia. The website itself is generally a true global model where expansion has allowed them to become even more popular than the New York Times.