Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and Outsourcing for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.

Delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation

A subset of grassroots journalism. A process in which readers submit individual reports that are collected into a larger dataset for use in reporting a story. Examples include damage reports in earthquakes as well as watchdog efforts to track various elected officials' stands on an issue