The seventh book about Harry Potter was translated into Chinese in just two days via the internet by a group of enthusiasts who didn’t even know each other, under the supervision of a student. This is how crowdsourcing, a quickly growing trend of using volunteers from all over the world, works. It is fast, efficient and brings in abundance of fresh ideas, which makes it more and more popular among social organizations and companies of all sizes.
Crowdsourcing allows tapping into virtually infinite human resources of internet users - way beyond the boundaries of any single business or formal association. In fact, well-known and extremely popular Wikipedia is an excellent example of a successful crowdsourcing project, in which volunteers can participate as writers and editors thus creating a universal source of information on basically any subject.