Crowdsourcing vs Democracy
Crowdsourcing as a pure democratic process is as doomed to fail as elected government.
It'a good way to generate ideas, solutions to specific small problems, and statistics.
Then some non-democratic process has to sort out the wheat from the chaff and turn it into something useful. That's called decision making.
The idea that the wisdom of the crowd can be greater than the wisdom of the individual is demonstrably false in many cases. Almost every newspaper carries an astrology column, a multi-billion dollar cosmetics industry caters to wishful thinking, and companies, special interest groups, and politicians spend inordinate amounts of money on "communication" - reshaping, and in many cases rewriting what used to be called common sense. To get a learned opinion about some complex current issue, the crowd turns to the wisdom of movie stars, "newsworthy" delinquent children of the rich and famous, &c. Experts are so, so, so boring!
The public education system caters to the least capable, thereby reducing us all to the lowest common denominator.
The saving grace of open crowdsourcing is that it relies on the intrinsic interest of the contributor, and the rewards are not attractive enough to the mass to generate huge floods of garbage solutions.
Crowdfunding is more like pushing penny stocks, somewhere between mass marketing and massive fraud.
