October 7, 2010 – A group of leading crowdsourcing companies has joined forces to create a trade organization, the Crowdsortium, to serve as a resource to crowdsourcing funders, practitioners, customers, researchers and eventually the crowd themselves. This goal is accomplished through best practices, education, data collection, advocacy and public dialogue.

This interesting piece of news was brought to our attention by PRWeb’s article, “First-Ever Crowdsourcing Organization Launches.”  The Crowdsortium publically opened itself to members at CrowdConf this week.

The crowdsourcing movement began to take shape 10 years ago, and has grown dramatically in recent years as a new model for getting work done. By enabling the rapid co-creation of complex solutions, this model has gained traction in a number of industries.

Membership in the Crowdsortium is free to all companies that join, but all members must meet a number of membership criteria, including being a crowdsourcing practitioner, customer, researcher or funder.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.