1. Origins of crowdsourcing

1.1 Background trends

A series of trends in society at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st enabled the emergence of crowdsourcing. First of all, the Internet connected a huge number of people and communities in a single network. Although this network was initially reserved for a small number of computer scientists, the "digital natives" generation made web use commonplace by integrating it into their everyday lives. This generation, so named by Marc Prensky, has always been familiar with computers and the Internet, and is therefore much less reluctant to participate and contribute on the web, unlike the previous generation, which was more passive and used to receiving content via more traditional media such as television or radio.

Whereas...