While Americans call it soccer, the rest of the world knows the game as football, and it looks as though the world’s sport is finally taking off in the U.S. with a little help from crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.
Soccer and crowdsourcing aren’t complete strangers: England’s Ebbsfleet United became the world’s first crowdsourced football club back in 2007 when several thousand fans came together to collectively purchase and run a football club. While that experiment garnered worldwide attention, today the United States is well on its way to hosting the next crowdfunded football club, one that hopes to use its celebrity founders to garner support for the nascent soccer scene in sunny San Diego, California.
Employment. A complex issue in its own right. And all the more complex for a tool like crowdsourcing that spans almost all countries and industries. While in Berlin at Crowdconvention, I picked up on some stirrings on this topic. And a debate seems to be on the horizon.
What happens when you get 150 crowdsourcing experts and leaders together in a swank hotel in the middle of Berlin for a day? Apparently nothing less than an explosion of ideas and an interesting collection of accents. I was glad I could contribute in both respects!
It’s been a wild ride.
Ten years ago crowdsourcing wasn’t even a word. At the time, NASA was still trying to figure out how to get people they later called “clickworkers” to find and categorize photos of craters on Mars. And, in the greater scheme of things, the idea of connecting businesses, causes and people online was just beginning to sprout. It wasn’t until 2006 that Jeff Howe coined the phrase crowdsourcing.