Everywhere I turn these days I am running into new ways that organizations are using the concept of crowdsourcing to get work done through the Internet. Today, it was a review of a Website that allows people to post questions and answers for quizzes online. These questions can then be grouped in to a quiz that is specifically targeting a piece of knowledge. In other words, it is a new way to tap the collective to complete a task. Immediately upon reading about this site, my mind began running through all the things that we could build online by crowdsourcing our specific pieces of knowledge.

I suppose that this is a natural progression of the capability to collaborate online. We started by allowing 2 people to collaborate through simple email and shared whiteboarding. Then we create portals so people within an organization could collaborate, and now we have wiki’s and Internet wide sites that let anyone collaborate (e.g.wikipedia.com.)The difference is the motivation.Many of the crowdsourcing sites are basically enlisting free, or nearly free, labor in order to resell the collective power, or intelligentsia they can harness.I have long believed that crowdsourcing is simply the next logical step past outsourcing.

This is a concept that needs to be leveraged. If you have lots of customers, members, or constituents of any kind, you must give some thought as to how crowdsourcing could be leveraged to either gain valuable input, or to get work done that now costs you money. Dell uses their dellideastorm.com site to get free market research done.Even pedestrian products like WD-40 uses their fan club to provide word of mouth marketing and new product distribution.We will one day look back at this time in history and mark it as a critical landmark where we began using technology to tap into the collective resources of peoples time and brainpower to create services and data stores that could never be gathered with this level of speed and depth.

Scott