An Outlook on Volunteer and Croudsourcing Based Computing

The digital revolution alongside with the evolution of social networking and widespread of personal and mobile devices enabled several new avenues. In particular, crowdsourcing raised and attracted interests on an innovative approach of performing tedious and repetitive work by outsourcing them to a wide population of people, a crowd. In this paper, such new trends are discussed by analyzing some relevant researches and examples. This way, the key aspects of the crowdsourcing phenomenon are identified starting from definitions and underlying working principles and motivations, through practical examples focusing on all the most relevant forms of adoption of these approaches, such as volunteering contribution in online communities, indirect crowdsourcing and gamification.