Crowdsourcing
A portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing," crowdsourcing occurs when a job is opened up to the public via the Internet. The idea behind crowdsourcing is to leverage the collective skills, intelligence, and resources of a diverse group of individuals to accomplish tasks or solve problems. It is very useful for large projects that are too much for one person or several people to handle. As crowdsourcing provides multiple perspectives, it is usually successful in finding new ways to complete a project or overcome obstacles.
Whether or not workers receive compensation for their work is usually defined as part of the project, so people know before they join.
A good example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia, a website that allows millions of people online to contribute information on thousands of topics.