The term crowdsourcing was introduced by Jeff Howe (2006). It is the act of a company or
organisation to take a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined,
and usually large, network of people in the form of an open call. As communication tools to
organize work have become widely available, and a well-educated global work force has come
online, crowdsourcing has become an increasingly important mechanism to organize work. We
discuss a categorisation of crowdsourcing, its costs and benefits and several examples. The use
of crowdsourcing begins with the question which strategic goal an organisation wants to achieve,
and whether the benefits outweigh the costs. We give some recommendations for adopting
crowdsourcing. This usually requires a certain amount of restructuring of existing workflows and
a willingness to become more open which may or may not be a welcome side effect.