Yesterday I read an article on a business website, talking about the difference between outsourcing and crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task which is traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsource it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. Typically by publically inviting the public to help develop some sort of new technology. The word was originally coined by Jeff Howe in Wired in 2006.
It remined me of Eric Raymonds wise words in The cathedral and the bazaar:
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
and he continues:
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
- see the similarities between crowdsourcing and open sourcing?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet 
Photo by RichardAM