I spent my lunch time today learning about a new crowdsourcing initiative from Tom Hulme – Design Director at IDEO in London.  Crowdsourcing is using the power of the crowd and moving away from the idea of the lonely genius that knows everything. It can be used to obtain services, ideas, funds or content by soliciting contributions (generally on a voluntary basis and online) from a large group of people. This will be the first of a series of posts on how we can use crowdsourcing initiatives for urban development.

Tom founded and now runs OpenIDEO , an open innovation platform that engages a community of over 51,000 users from more than 160 countries to solve challenges for social good. I have been following for the past year a couple of crowdsourcing initiatives but found his really interesting since it follows a pre-defined process to bring solutions to a challenge using the…