When using the apps Charadium or Draw Something, I sometimes had to draw words like ‘accounting’, ‘fairytale’, ‘hate’ or ‘alternative’. Words I can explain, but that are very hard to draw (not being a native English speaker sometimes caused me problems with words of which I didn’t even know what they meant). So when trying to think of a task in which Roamlers had to draw a (difficult) word, we thought it would be challenging to ask Roamlers (both in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) to draw the word crowdsourcing.
Yes, it is a hard word to draw. Yes, some people just took a photo from the web and yes, we received some drawings of crowdsurfing. But also: yes, we received some great entries! Just for the record; crowdsourcing is the process of taking a task (generally performed by one person or a team) and distributing this among a crowd of people. This can be done both offline and online.
Most of the drawings contained light bulbs. Crowdsourcing is apparently mostly associated with gathering ideas or getting an idea. For other Roamlers crowdsourcing is equal to Roamler itself. They drew mobile devices, the Roamler sign and the Netherlands.
What’s really interesting to see is how Roamlers define the relationship between the task (or person/organization) and the crowd. Some Roamlers set the task as a starting point and arrows pointing towards the crowd together with question marks, as if the task was asking the crowd a question. Other Roamlers drew arrows from the crowd to the task; the crowd generates input for the task at hand. Which drawing do you like best?
