A crowdsourcing platform allows a organization to collaborate with a community to provide solutions to a project. When organizations decide on crowdsourcing a project they can either attempt to attract the crowd themselves, creating their own platform in the process, or make use of an existing crowdsourcing platform with an established community.

The main difference is that an exisiting platorm will have an established community. Opting to create your own platform will require investment in attracting and establishing a community. Examples of crowdsourcing platforms include:

• InnoCentive

A platform with a community of over 200,000 members. InnCentive posts a wide range of problems from organizations in  areas such as engineering, computer science, chemistry, life sciences and business

• TopCoder

A platform with a community of over 247, 000 members. TopCoder posts computer programming problems from organizations in the form of competitions. The community are then asked to design, develop and test the software developed in the competitions. More information can be found here.

• Amazon Mechanical Turk

• A platform with a community of over 100, 000 members. Allows anybody to post tasks that need to be completed like writing product descriptions or finding broken links on a website.

Deciding on whether to create your own platform or use an existing platform depends on the circumstance. Although creating your own platform will require advertising in attracting people to be apart of the community it also means you will have exclusive use of the community. Pepsi did this with a campaign that allowed people to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners received a $10,000 prize with their design been featured on Pepsi cans. This was also seen as a marketing campaign by Pepsi.

Opting to make use of existing platform means that you have an established community so the chances of reaching a wide audience are likely. These platforms have experience in running successful crowdsourcing projects so there is no experimenting on trying to make the project succeed.

1. Crowdsourcing Example – People Participation in Crowdsourcing Platforms
2. Crowdsourcing Books
3. Facebook’s Crowdsourcing Translation Reward System