Crowd means the crowd or gathering and funding means to gather money. So the simple meaning of crowd + funding is to gather money or gather money from many people. This is not new. People have been offering small amounts to build temples and roads for centuries. In your locality you may have collected donations for occasional and festivals any such festival or you may have collected funds for any NGO during schooling! It was all a kind of offline crowdfunding. Maybe you think what kind of things to do with digitization? So you can tell that with the help of internet today, people are raising money from people all over the world for a variety of initiatives or personal benefits. And the process of crowdfunding or gathering of monks was limited to a village or town; it has now become a global phenomenon. If you are going to raise money for any work, instead of going to everyone's home, you can talk to thousands of people on social media together and motivate you to con...