Crowdsourcing; Is That What I've Always Done to Get My Problems Solved

It was about 5 months ago that I saw the term "Crowdsourcing" Here  for the first time .

in the first view I thought it's what I'm looking for the research. when I searched about it and read some papers I get more and more interested.

Why?

previously when I encountered a problem that was ambiguous or unsolvable for me, and I didn't get the answer by searching in search engines, I would emailed the problem to some of my friends that I believed they have better knowledge than me in that case; and I often got answer from 1/2 of them.

or I would posted my problems in a forum and I got answers from more than 1/2 people.

the first technique could be defined as friend-sourcing and the second as forum-sourcing or community-sourcing  .... and if you compare these 2 terms with crowdsourcing you could conclude that crowdsourcing is a general term for both of them.

yeah ! I had used crowdsourcing for my problems even before I knew the term.

So; you could imagine why I'm interested in Crowdsourcing ...  Crowdsourcing is an approach that I use to solve most of my problems, it motivates me to help other people as well ...

I my self when get an answer from a forum for a problem; then prefer to be permanent user of that forum and answer the questions of other members as well...

in summary :

one incentive that could motivate people to participate in crowdsourcing tasks is that to give them something  they really need; it could be an answer to a very simple question that s/he discussed in the forum ...

online-forums may have more potential that Mechanical Turk Marketplaces if we could manage it well .