A Look at the History of Crowdsourcing
While today’s tech savvy Millenials may know the history of crowdsourcing as pioneered by websites like Wikipedia, advanced by those like oDesk and Kiva at least one of them is finding out the truth that history does in fact, repeat itself.
An intern with the U.S.-based Smithsonian Institute, Elena Bruno, recently posted a blog about finding evidence of occurrences of crowdsourcing back as far as 1847. Bruno’s research project was inspired by the Institute’s current use of crowdsourcing to bolster the research side of an organization known primarily for its museums. This pioneer 19th century project was a metrological study of climatic data and storm observations. A network of some 150 volunteer weather observers all over the country, provided input, with the telegraph used to gather volunteers’ data and to make new information available to the public daily. The project is thought to be the origin of today’s U.S. National Weather Service.
100 years later, in the 1950’s, the Operation Moonwatch program enlisted more than 100 teams of volunteers worldwide in tracking the path of a satellite launched by the United States. Then the 1970’s saw the emergence of the Center for Tropical Forest Science a global network of forest research that continues today. The network comprises more than thirty locations across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, involving hundreds of scientists from more than 40 institutions.
Today, with social media and mobile platforms, the Institute’s crowdsourcing projects have become even more extensive and enlisted an even broader worldwide network, well demonstrated by the fact that the author Ms. Bruno is completing her internship at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute while a student at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.
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