Lionbridge Technologies Inc. (NASD: LIOX), a Waltham, Mass.-based crowdsourcing firm, announced plans to acquire Virtual Solutions Inc., a privately held provider of crowdsourcing solutions to state and local governments. Lionbridge will pay $3.6 million in closing, $1.0 million in deferred cash consideration and $3.0 million earn-outs over three years.

Crowdsourcing is a process that allows projects to be outsourced to a group of people or community instead of to a single person.

“The cloud has fundamentally changed the nature of work and disrupted conventional BPO and staffing models,” said Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan. “Organizations across industries are increasingly turning to enterprise crowdsourcing as a proven business solution that offers significant cost advantages, greater flexibility and faster access to a larger pool of globally distributed qualified resources.”