ABSTRACT
Although the term crowdsourcing, according to the o¶cial records, was used for the ¦rst time in 2006 in a “Wired” journal paper by Howe (2006), the concept of on-the-¬y recruiting of a generally large set of contributors to solving a speci¦c problem dates back by centuries. For instance, it is well known that in 1714, the British government o§ered a money prize (the Longitude Prize) to anyone who could devise a reliable method to compute the longitude a ship was located at (Sobel, 1998); this was an example of entrusting a nonorganized-yet having unexplored intelligent capabilities-pool of people with the task of solving a speci¦c, information-retrieval problem. Probably less widely known is the fact that Toyota, the Japanese car manufacturer, started a competition in 1936 to get its current logo, chosen among 27,000 candidate entries (DesignCrowd, 2010).
