In this post I attempt to describe different types of crowdsourcing. This post will be continuously updated with examples, descriptions and potentially new categories.
Participatory sensing is about people carrying special equipment with them and take measurements for monitoring for example an environmental phenomenon.
Crowdsensing is about sharing data collected by sensing devices.
Crowdsourcing is an umbrella term that encapsulates a number of crowd-related activities. Wikipedia has the following definition: Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.
Online crowdsourcing is about outsourcing online tasks to people. For example people doing tasks for micropayments in Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Citizen science is about assisting scientist in complex (for the machine) and time-consuming tasks (for the scientists). For example, identifying fossils in rocky environments from hundred of pictures or identifying the galaxies of the universe. More interesting projects can be found in zooniverse.org.
Spatial crowdsourcing is about doing tasks that requires participants to go to specific locations to do specific tasks. For instance, taking a photo of a plant that grows in a specific location would require participants to physically go to that location to complete their task.
Mobile crowdsourcing describes crowdsourcing activities that are processed on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Human computation is a type of collective intelligence and crowdsourcing where humans assist machines in performing tasks that are difficult for them.
Opportunistic sensing is about doing tasks without users active contribution. For example, take a measurement automatically when the device is near some location.
If you want to add to the descriptions or disagree with something above feel free to comment below.
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