The 2006 Netflix Contest has come to convey the idea of crowdsourced predictive modeling, in which a dataset and a prediction challenge are made publicly available.  Individuals and teams then compete to develop the best performing model.   The Netflix contest had as its goal the improvement of the then-existing movie rating prediction system, in which the company would predict for individual users what rating they would give a particular movie.  It was not the first such contest, but it had the richest purse – $1,000,000.