Crowd Sourcing

• If you've got a lot of data that needs analysing, can you get a lot of people to help.
• This is the idea of crowd sourcing. You get a lot of people to help you analyse the data.
• Journalists get a lot of people to help them check facts.
• Stackoverflow is an online community that gets a lot of people to help others with programming problems.
• Astronmers get a lot of people to help look at telescope images.
• The problem is that the average person doesn't know what to look for in a telescope image.
• People's extraordinary pattern matching ability can be exploited by setting up "games" for them to, for example, find planets.
• Companies with large data problems can also outsource the analysis.
• This can be to other companies.
• If the problem can be simplified and the data is not too sensitive, you can find people to analyse data or parts of data for relatively little expense.