With International Human Rights day on the minds of many, the GDC would like to draw attention to the voices of content producers around the world. The following post describes "crowdsourcing", a term that encapsulates the sourcing of user-generated content across borders, geographic and otherwise. Check out Global Voices, a project that is harnessing the power of blogs to share curated accounts of global news pieces from local bloggers and digital sources.

Originally described by journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, it is hard to talk about the internet these days without hearing the word "crowdsourcing". Describing a networked, post-outsourcing business world, Howe called it "the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few."

In the last two-and-a-half years, the meaning of crowdsourcing has broadened – crowdsourcing is now associated with all kinds of user-generated content, paid or unpaid. Web developers, venture capitalists, marketers, and end-users have taken a liking to the term, and crowdsourcing is now a bona fide internet buzz word, just like "Web 2.0", "Social Bookmarking", or "Avatar". In fact, decentralizing information generation is not a particularly new idea – it is, after all, the essence of the internet. Still, increasingly pervasive consumer technologies have accelerated the participation of non-experts. And with previously untapped labor pools now connected via internet and mobile phone, new potential for business crowdsourcing abounds.

User-generated content not only engages residents in their communities (linked by interest area or by geography), it helps the unacquainted understand the local context, and the acquainted vet their traditional information sources. Yelp, a lively example of crowdsourcing in the United States, runs a free web site to which the site's users have posted millions of reviews rating everything from local restaurants and hotels to auto repair shops and religious organizations. An international site, MyBikeLane, features pictures taken by frustrated bicyclists of vehicles (including their license plates) blocking publicly-delineated bike lanes.

The November 2008 Mumbai attacks highlighted the relevance and immediacy of crowdsourcing: at the onset of the attacks, Flickr and Twitter were flooded with images and text from the ground, respectively, while traditional mainstream media outlets like CNN and the BBC republished user-generated content. In the following days, television programming and the internet brimmed with news reports, expressions of shock and solidarity, discussions, and debates about the contributions,  impact and accuracy of citizen journalists.

Mobile- and SMS-friendly, Twitter allows every person with a mobile phone to contribute content. The same is true of Ushahidi, which harnesses local citizens' contributions to report on conflict as seen following Kenya's 2008 elections and violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Global Voices Online, a project from Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Ivan Sigal, organizes a team of volunteers that sift through the world's blogs to "aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online". Extracting meaningful passages, videos, and photographs, Global Voices calls attention to content produced by citizens around the world, a particularly appealing service in a world of diminishing news staffs. In fact, Global Voices provides instructions for media actors on how to use their locally-produced content in their stories.

While there are many examples of civic media via crowdsourcing in the developing world, there are also opportunities for sustainable economic development. These applications of crowdsourcing are still relatively new but they closely mirror the meaning set forth by Jeff Howe.

txteagle, from MIT's Nathan Eagle, is one such project. txteagle will connect literate, English-speaking mobile phone users in the developing world with companies willing to pay them for low-cost services best performed by a human. These include transcription, translation, image tagging, and so on.

As mobile phones become less expensive and more sophisticated, txteagle represents a new breed of business process outsourcing – low-cost, rapid, sourced in the developing world, and driving economic development.

Whether it takes the form of customer reviews, civic engagement, citizen journalism, or business process outsourcing, crowdsourcing offers a myriad of new opportunities for international development practitioners and beneficiaries alike.

Paul Goodman is a guest contributor to the Global Development Commons blog. 

Have a good example of crowdsourcing in the developing world? Disagree with Paul's description of crowdsourcing? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.