Unless you do not update on trends, you have heard of Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing can be also called multi-sourcing, distributed sourcing and so on, it simply means there is not a single source, not a one point to contact for a specific issue or task.

Crowdsource is the concept of using the power of a crowds to accomplish a task.

For example see what Google had done, it has no support on its behalf, everything is managed through their forums.

Crowdsource should be strongly integrated with gamification.

Take for instance stackoverflow which has questions posted with number of views,  number answers, some social aspects on the user taking part in the thread of the question and more.
The developers community is helping itself by answering the questions opened by members in the forum:

A cool thing is that for orphaned questions with no answer, it offers an award of points bounty:

But do not mistake crowdsource for support solutions only.

A few years back, Google faced a problem coming to index images. It had a huge amount of images with index that it didn’t trust.

Google wanted to label the images and did it using a crowdsource game, where each time 2 people from around the world got the same image and had to write what the image is.

If both got an image with a cat, and both wrote that there is a cat in that image, then most likely the image is a cat image. Google had labeled an incredible number of images and photos like this.

From the users’ point of view, they were happy to see that I, Joe from NYC identified an image same as Chang from Beijing.

You might have asked yourself why should one invest his time in helping the masses? How come this crowdsource idea is working well?

Research have shown that motivating a person by giving him more money or other material benefits is effective for the short run, but in the long run people will do what they are interested in and show off what they believe they are good at.

The bottom line is that crowdsource will get wider and include gamification concepts to increase the response rate and input quality.

Crowdcourse is a wonderful driver to supportive solutions by the community, and it brings great value to a company and to the community in return.