Source: Marc Goodman, Forbes
Marc Goodman, the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and Citizen Lab Senior Fellow in Future Crime, writes in Forbes magazine about the growing popularity of crowdsourcing by international organized crime groups and local neighborhood thugs.
Crowdsourcing began as a legitimate tool to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to solve complex business and scientific challenges. Unfortunately, these very same techniques are increasingly being adopted by the criminal underground for nefarious purposes.
The concept of crowdsourcing first gained widespread attention in an article written in 2006 by Jeff Howe for Wired Magazine. Howe defined crowdsourcing as the act of outsourcing a task to a large, undefined group of people through an open call.
The increasing application of crowdsourcing is changing “business as usual” in a wide variety of industries. In a noted example, Don Tapscott, in his book Wikinomics, described how one Canadian gold mining company facing a looming shutdown desperately turned to the general public to help solve a critical business problem. The company, Goldcorp, was so frustrated with the inability of its own geologists to locate any gold that it did something unheard of at the time: it offered $500,000 to anyone who could find and map the location of the company’s own gold in its own mines. To facilitate the effort, Goldcorp posted their full datasets online. After receiving submissions from more than a thousand people in 50 different countries, Goldcorp achieved the success that had so eluded the firm previously. A member of the public used Goldcorp’s data to make an incredible discovery and to locate more than $3 billion worth of gold using techniques never previously employed in the mining industry.
For the full article, see here.