The tragedy of the Haitian earthquake was a disaster felt around the world and one of the first to make use of crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an contractor (or relief organization) to large group of people or community through an open call and with the wide spread of broadband, wireless, cell phones, disaster relief efforts have changed forever. Everyone with a computer can help, sifting through satellite photos, translating messages or updating maps, contributing to life-saving relief efforts. Crowd-sourcing solves coordination problems on the ground and some say it may be the greatest thing to happen to non-profit relief efforts since the helicopter.

Crowd-sourcing’s benefits are not limited to just disaster relief, however. With businesses going global and far-flung staffs often not in the same city, international news being made and reported instantaneously in this 24-hour-a-day news cycle world, museums sharing resources across the internet and via Skype symposiums with people not on site weighing in, contributors to such open sources as Wikipedia changing the way we gain information, and on-line learning adding to our general knowledge pool—it is a rapidly evolving world and one where ways for more of us to come together—like crowd-sourcing—become ever more-important.

Read this classic article:

http://blog.techsoup.org/node/1529utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=sage&utm_content=dec2&utm_campaign=btc

and then give your opinion—Is crowd-sourcing an invaluable tool in all situations or more apt to cause greater confusion, say, at the scene of a disaster?