Crowdsourcing involves obtaining information or resources from a wide swath of people. In general, we can break this up into four main categories: Wisdom - Wisdom of crowds is the idea that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individual experts when it comes to problem-solving or identifying values (like the weight of a cow or number of jelly beans in a jar). Creation - Crowd creation is a collaborative effort to design or build something. Wikipedia and other wikis are examples of this. Open-source software is another good example. Voting - Crowd voting uses the democratic principle to choose a particular policy or course of action by "polling the audience." Funding - Crowdfunding involved raising money for various purposes by soliciting relatively small amounts from a large number of funders.